When you're reading a popular-science story about a new discovery, there are two things to be careful about:

- are the claims it's making about the discovery right, or exaggerated?

- are the claims it's making about what people previously believed right, or exaggerated?

When I'm reading about areas that I happen to know something about, I find that there's a smallish tendency to exaggerate the first and a large one to exaggerate the second.

I think it's likely that's true in other areas. I get the impression it's particularly common for archaeological discoveries for some reason.

Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.

Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.

Probably because you need to exaggerate both for people to care. Everyone thought X was true and now we have evidence for X to be true isn't a particularly interesting thing to read about. Either you insert some drama or you don't even bother reporting it to the larger public.

News are entertainment, after all.