How not to do science
From my amateur scientist reading of a number of blogs and science magazines, this is, sadly, far less a case of mis-interpreting data than another instance of "science by press release and media hype".
In their desperate drive to be the first to claim a discovery and to secure future funding by sheer amount of headlines - knowing full well how the ignorami in the MSM and the public would interpret the report and, worse, its possible refutation (*) - they jumped the gun.
I recall a similar case a few years ago, in which deformities in skeletons found in Herculaneum were misinterpreted as coming from Syphilis. Announced to the media before even a peer review of the paper, it was jumped on by the usual suspects in the "the Columbian exchange was only a one-way road of disaster to the Americas and lovely tomatoes and chillis the other way, perpetrated by Evil White Men" crowd. Egg on face all around when it turned out that the deformities likely were the result of a "relative" of Syphilis out of Africa, known since ancient times - but, of course, *that* wasn't in the MSM.
(*) Because you just know that "certain" people take this all the way to "see, the Big Bang is just rubbish, these scientists all just make it up as they go along".