Epigenetic Inheritance: Real Mechanism or Statistical Noise?

Biology

I keep seeing these articles claiming that the stress your grandparents felt during a famine or a war is literally written into your DNA via methylation. It sounds like a clean explanation for why things are the way they are, but when you actually dig into the peer reviewed literature for humans, the evidence is surprisingly thin. Most of the high profile claims seem to rely on rodent studies. Mice are great for lab work, but they aren't humans. We are seeing a huge gap between what the pop science blogs are selling and what the actual replication data shows. It feels like we have accepted a biological narrative because it is compelling, rather than waiting for the rigorous proof required for human subjects. Where do we draw the line between a legitimate biological pathway and statistical noise in these studies? If the human data is this shaky, why is the narrative so dominant in public discourse?