This reminds me of another story - BGI was sequencing the chicken genome, and for a while, a lot of people who did other sequencing projects kept receiving chicken DNA in their sequencing data files (as contamination).

As it turns out, paleogenomics takes next level cleanliness, far more than anyone expected, particularly when you're trying to sequence something so close to human DNA.

Sometimes verifying the little details can get in the way of publication velocity. It's a risk many advanced scientists take because the chance of getting caught (publishing something that is later shown to be obviously false using careful control experiments) is low, and the risk to your career of being second to publish.