› added 9 years ago

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TIL An Irish mummified corpse from 392 - 201 BC was so perfectly preserved in a peat bog that archaeologists could tell that he used “hair gel”; his hair contained a substance made from vegetable oil mixed with resin from pine trees found in Spain/France, proving that imports/trade was done.

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yQPAV TIL that Italy didn't have tomatoes and India didn't have peppers until the Americas were discovered
0d9d5 TIL of '27 Club', a list of celebrities who died at the age of 27, because there exists a statistical spike (particularly musicians) who die at this age. There doesn't exist any pattern, whatsoever, for the cause of death.
Egpn0 TIL As secretary for the chancellery in 1503, Machiavelli was dispatched to Rome to gather intel and report on the new conclave after Pius III died 26 days into his papacy. He reported the % Giuliano Della Rovere was expecting to get and had the news of his election hours before it was announced
pYyw4 TIL in 1862 John Langdon Down was the first to describe a distinct mental disability, calling it "Mongolism" due to his perception that children with it shared facial similarities. Now called Down Syndrome, was discovered in the 1950s to be caused by the presence a third copy of chromosome 21.
yVLDV TIL that Halo 3 players worldwide teamed up in a "Great War" to defend humanity against aliens, with round-the-clock campaign shifts, killing billions of aliens, discussing it in 21 million online discussion posts, and creating 1.4 petabytes of data of 'service records'