Looks like the prospectors might be a bunch of crumb-snatchers (people who take undeserved credit for events, outcomes or other things that they played no role in).
Also, I believe I read somewhere else that the meteorite in that photo is not in that village any more. Apparently a Chinese company working in the area hauled it off. Maybe I'm thinking of a different meteorite.
Just because science can theorize something is there, it takes a lot of effort to prove it is true through experimenting. Take the Higgs Boson for example requiring the amount of effort of creating the LHC to prove it existed.
Having something synthesized in a lab is one thing, but seeing it actually found in objects in space but not here on terra firma would be something new to science.
"Elaliite was first identified in nature by scientists from the University of Alberta who were given a 70 gram piece of the 15-ton El Ali meteorite that came to the attention of the scientific community in 2020.[2] Elaliite was named after the El Ali district in Somalia where the meteorite was found.[2]
The mineral was identified by Andrew Locock who is employed by the university as the head of its electron microprobe laboratory,[3] and classified by geologist Chris Herd.[4] Locock also identified the first natural specimen of elkinstantonite in the same sample.[5]
Synthetic versions of elaliite were produced in a French laboratory in the 1980s but could not be categorised as a mineral until they were found in nature.[3] The future of the meteorite is uncertain as it has been shipped to China presumably for sale.[6]"
Thank you for clarifying that, my previous understanding was incorrect.
Plus, that part specifying that a mineral cannot be called a mineral until it is found in nature, that's pretty danged cool! And probably explains the disconnect between articles and science in this case.
My "favourite" disconnect is the term "organic". In science, it just means a molecule that contains carbon-hydrogen or carbon-carbon, Methane being one of the simplest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound
If you asked a layman what it meant, you'd get an answer ranging from "food grown without chemicals", through to "a part of a living thing".
https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/2-minerals-discovered...