“Matthias and I met up again in the lab after Christmas vacations and sat down to write our paper. One major question was where to send it. Nature, the British journal, and its American counterpart Science, enjoy the most prestige and visibility in the scientific community and in the general media, and either would have been an obvious choice. But they both impose strict length limits on manuscripts, and I wanted to explain all the details of what we had done—not only to convince the world that we had the real thing but also to promote our painstaking methods of extracting and analyzing ancient DNA. In addition, I had become disenchanted with both journals because of their tendency to publish flashy ancient DNA results that did not meet the scientific criteria our group considered necessary. They often seemed more interested in publishing papers that would give them coverage in the New York Times and other major media outlets than in making sure the results were sound and likely to hold up.”