I'd suspect that research (and especially pop culture summaries of research) always conveniently reflects current trends. The way to get mass attention is to be in line with some message that is popular or advantageous to promulgate. The research is probably legit, it's just never the whole story, and so we get the summary that tells us are ancestors lived in alme hipster paradise until somehow modern Europeans screwed it all up. 50 years from now it will be some different version.