Right, this is overselling a paper at its worst. They're just dressing up a mundane result with bombastic rhetoric.

I'm so fed up with science and politics journalism.

The article even makes mentioned potential fraud: "[Thomas] was forgetful and sloppy, but at worst he was being deceptive" Without any further explanation.

Science "journalism" certainly has the reputation it deserves.

To be fair, that’s a quote from the co-author of the study not the author of this article. And it does elaborate further later in the article on the context of where he was either forgetful or deceptive.

True, but the article author decided to include it. A less charitable interpretation might say it was included strictly as click bait.

>"Spectacularly wrong" here appears to mean that he correctly identified that the bluestones came from the Preseli hills almost 200 miles from Stonehenge (and was the first to do so), but didn't get quite the right outcrop.

200 miles inside of England is like him pointing to Guatemala instead of Iowa.

He wasn't off by 200 miles. That's just how far the source of the stones is away (both the location he gave and the new one). You should probably read the comment again.

Oh, I got that wrong while reading the article too then.

Yeah,the article is worded very poorly (misleadingly?). I just measured the distance between the location Thomas originally gave (Carn Menyn) and one of the two new locations (Craig Rhos-y-felin) and it's about 4.5 kilometers.