It's laregly emerging knowledge, so anything is kind of new. What is odd about it is that something can bind to the genome in the adult and thereby change the way proteins are expressed. This binding is effectively the same as a mutation that is passed on to the children for one or more generations, but which can also go away.

One possible place where this is showing up, which would be really disturbing, is the odd fact that the offspring of people who starved at times while growing up, appear to live longer than the offspring of people who were well fed while growing up. Wouldn't that be disturbing.