One of the happiest stories of last year had to do with Herodotus and the ants.

Herodotus, you might recall, was the great Greek historian of the fifth century BC. A wide traveler of the ancient world, possessor of a good eye for detail, demanding with sources, he possessed a highly developed sense of what constituted an explanation. He was a gifted storyteller as well, accustomed to weaving quotations and point-making anecdotes into his narratives—even the occasional story which he noted he didn’t quite believe, but which was too good not to pass along. Just as Hippocrates is the patron of doctors, Herodotus is the patron of newspaper reporters.

It was he who wrote up one of the most intriguing get-rich-quick stories of all time.

It appears in the section of his History of the Persian wars devoted to describing the extent and the organization of the Persian empire.

"In India there is a sandy desert where there are ants smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes. And these ants make their dwelling underneath the earth and they bring up the sand when they are tunneling, just as ants in Greece do, and the sand which is brought up is of gold.

"The Indians go after this gold, each of them yoking together three camels…..The Indians have little sacks which they fill with sand as quickly as then can. They have to do it quickly because, as soon as the ants smell them, they chase after them…so if the Indians didn’t manage to get a head start there is no way any of them would get out alive."

This account of animals bringing gold to humans had a compelling, dreamlike quality in the ancient world. It inspired an enduring quest among adventures—from Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC to Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, nearly 2500 years later. Pliny the Elder claimed that ant’s horns rested in the Temple of Hercules; Suleyman the Magnificent is said to have been given ants "pelts" by the emperor of Persia.

Scholars agree that Herodotus placed the home of the ants north of Kasapatyros, the ancient capital of Kashmir—near the Karakorum Mountains where present-day Pakistan, India and China intersect. But otherwise there has been no consensus about the significance of his account. The plentiful presence of stories like this one in the History has inspired a certain division of opinion among historians. To most of them, Herodotus is "the father of history"; a few have insisted he was a gullible yarn-spinner, even the "king of liars." Until last year.

It was in the autumn that a French adventurer and ethnologist named Michel Peissel returned from the Dansar Plain, a high plateau on the upper reaches of the Indus River in northernmost Pakistan. He announced he had seen the "ants" and met the tribe that mined their burrowings.

The "ants" were marmots, furry groundhog-like rodents possessing sharp teeth and long claws. Living in colonies, they burrowed deep in gold-bearing soil beneath the sand, then threw up their burrowings on the surface in mounds.

Minaro tribesmen, isolated Tibetan-speakers who inhabited the plain, collected the soil because it contained much gold dust, Peissel reported. Recently the bottom has dropped out of the business, as the price of gold sagged the rival soldiers used the marmots for target practice. (The Dansar Plain is claimed by both India and Pakistan.)

Much of the background is related in Peissel’s 1982 book The Ant’s Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in Himalayas. He relates other stories of his wanderings in the Himalayas as well: How he discovered what he believes is that source of the Mekong River; how he identified a breed of ponies unchanged since the Stone Age. What was news last year—as reported by Marlise Simons in The New York Times and Dana Thomas in The Washington Post—was that Peissel had finally located the marmots themselves.

So what accounts for the confusion over the centuries? Peissel says that the word for marmot in ancient Persian is "mountain mouse ant." Herodotus himself traveled as far east as Babylon, but he never made it to India. He isn’t thought to have spoken Persian, Perhaps he was simply the victim of a bad translation.

A good deal of testing of Peissel’s discovery remains to be done. Specialists of all sorts will have their say. But in the meantime, it is hard not to cheer the French ethnologist. "I think this confirms the legend," he says. "I think it vindicates Herodotus, who often has been called a liar"