Show us the basket!
Basically they get a text that states facts and they rewrite it.
This happens since actual reporting is costy: paper press has no money to send people everywhere. In fact many websites dont even pay to the agencies - they just parrot the news from other paper or website. This article quotes the "Guardian" and few other sources. So it seems it is not an original source.
Being an original source is not only costy. Problem is that others will parrot you - and you dont get any money for that.
Putting some interns to sit all day and parrot 4 articles per day is surprisingly easy if you can get some photos.
On a side note: I read an article when a real reporter joined a boiler room website, where they were paid to manufacture 4-8 fake articles per day. Basically fake news, attacks on political opponents, "commentary" and similar. They basically were paid to invent lies all day - with one caveat - try to not get sued. Hard to debunk a room that produces say 6 x 4 = 24 fake articles per day. That's how those russian KGB propaganda mills operate. They mostly parrot and quote each other. Some unknown website writes blantant lies, this is parroted to an article - and then those fake news sites parrot it more and quote some source that nobody from Italy heard about (often the source intentionally gets lost in the cycle of quotes). You can easily generate lies that cause outrage.
It sounds that only grape seeds and doum nuts were what remained of the fruit.
> Researchers excavating the sunken ruins of Thônis-Heracleion have discovered an array of archaeological treasures. (Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation)
That is obviously not a wicker basket. It looks like red-figure pottery.
Compare this quote from the article:
> Other objects found on or surrounding the tumulus included ancient pottery, bronze artifacts and figurines depicting the Egyptian god Osiris.
> “We found hundreds of deposits made of ceramic,” Goddio tells the Guardian. “One above the other. These are imported ceramic, red on black figures.”
Probably there are some remnants of seeds and a bit of dark goo inside something that is a basket only after a lot of analysis.
Fruit just doesn't do well underwater for any length of time. Except for being frozen, encased in sap or in volcanic ash, there isn't many ways to preserve the shape of the fruit for thousands of years.
It is perhaps 90% as good as dental floss at liberating fibres from between teeth, perhaps 95%.
Not much selection pressure, in other words.