The reporting on this has been utterly dreadful, and Seamus Blackley and his collaborators are jointly responsible for this. Just look at the headline:<p><i>A Conversation With the Team That Made Bread With Ancient Egyptian Yeast: How a scientist harvested 4,500-year-old yeast and turned it into a loaf of sourdough</i><p>Wow, they did it, right? They absolutely, definitively made sourdough from 4,500-year-old yeast! Oh wait:<p><i>"And, look, there may not be any ancient yeast in this. This could all be crazy, because we haven’t done all the science, and we’re going to. But it definitely acted different. It was really exciting."</i><p>What a joke. Blackley isn't a 13 year old at a science fair, and neither are his collaborators. They knew that publishing this as a tweetstorm with the disclaimers at the bottom would be open to misinterpretation, and it was. Here are a couple of lines from his tweets that would make anyone think they did it:<p><i>This crazy ancient dough fermented and rose beautifully. Here it is in the basket, just before being turned out to bake.<p>The crumb is light and airy, especially for a 100% ancient grain loaf. The aroma and flavor are incredible.</i><p>Yes, I blame all the journalists as well for not doing their fucking jobs and, you know, calling up actual scientists and Egyptologists who've already tried similar things.