Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Gosh, journalistic standards are so high



The BBC has a nice little story on the discovery of stone tools (nutcrackers) used by chimpanzees about 4300BP. Then they have to go and spoil it all in the penultimate paragraph:
The tools were found to be 4,300 years old, which, in human terms, corresponds to the later Stone Age, before the advent of agriculture.
Now nearly everybody knows that agriculture started in the fertile crescent about 11500BP: so that's an error of over 7000 years. It's not even as though this one's hard to check. Here's a quick reference: to Wikipedia (it took me 25 seconds to find it).

This is exactly why we should use the MSM and pay the enormous licence fee. Painstaking fact checking and editorial oversight.

Well, I can at least agree to the latter!

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