It's actually pretty common in all kinds of fields to see others reproduce things that they have known for decades. A fun (and infamous) example is this paper (

It's actually pretty common in all kinds of fields to see others reproduce things that they have known for decades. A fun (and infamous) example is this paper (http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152 http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152) which rediscovers the trapezoidal rule to calculate area under the curve and gets published.