Of course, there is both good and bad coverage of science in the media. Entertainingly, a Mail Online article has both. It covers a Nature paper by Copeland et al., a team of anthropologists who measured levels of strontium isotopes in teeth from our early human ancestors. The Mail Online article starts “Scientists may finally have confirmed what every woman from Raquel Welch to Wilma Flintstone has always suspected. Even back in prehistoric times, the female of the species was very much the boss.”

Clearly, it would be impressive if scientists could tell what a cartoon character suspects from levels of strontium isotopes in prehistoric teeth. Sadly, we can’t. We also cannot tell if women in prehistoric times were “the boss” or not from teeth.

What the data does suggest (not prove) is that, as the Mail Online article goes on to say:  “The experts concluded that most males lived and died in their birthplaces, while females were more likely to find new homes.” This seems to me to be a good summary of what the authors of the paper actually found. The second half of the articles seems like a sensible clear description of the work, which scientists should welcome.

Newspaper articles (and maybe blog posts) need to entertain as well as inform, otherwise no one will read them. So invoking “Raquel Welch, the doeskin-bikini-clad heroine of One Million Years BC” in a story about our ancestors can be OK. Although it seems unlikely our ancestors wore doeskin bikinis, or indeed buckskin budgie smugglers. But extrapolating the data to make statements about dominance in prehistoric times misleads people.