and tell me why i should ever trust something from someone who
swaps the location of towns on a map, while the point of said paper is about the spreading of the plague along trade routes.
Because people will make mistakes. If you expect papers to be 100% accurate, you'll always be disappointed. You have to account for possible mistakes. Whether they're accidental or misleading on purpose is to a degree irrelevant at first - we should always watch out for them.
Even in situations where mistakes cost lives, we put multiple failsafes and reviews and clear instructions in place - and still say they reduce the likelihood, rather than prevent accidents.
Given the paper already appears to have a correction for something minor, one more would seem appropriate, yes - it’s a pretty jarring error.
But it’s just disingenuous to say it affects (let alone “invalidates”) the actual study.
And shouldn’t a proper pedant spot that the top pin isn’t even where Lübeck is - that’s Rostock.
Does the swap in the position of the two cities compromise the findings in any way? If not, it's an irrelevant mistake like misspelling a word. What do you expect them to do? retract the paper because they misspelled a word?
It could, because in the timeframe the paper is about, they were geographically near, but had no real direct connection to speak of. Traveling over land along branches of the 'old salt routes' took at least two days, and that was fast. They were
transport hubs of different branches of the early Hanseatic League.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/50/E11790
and tell me why i should ever trust something from someone who swaps the location of towns on a map, while the point of said paper is about the spreading of the plague along trade routes.
Instantly invalidated...(forever!)