› added 12 years ago

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TIL that a ship sank in Alaska waters during the gold rush with as much as $260 million in gold aboard that’s never been recovered.

Read more alaskadispatch.com

via reddit.com

Xa8Q TIL: Of a Chechen terrorist attack in Moscow theater in 2002. Of the 130 people who died in the attack, only 1 was killed by terrorists, the other 129 were killed by the Russian special forces trying to rescue them.
ADBla TIL evidence of Homo erectus having lived on remote islands 150 miles of the coast of Africa suggests they were capable of crossing long distances over the sea, between 500,000 and a million years ago, which implies that they built boats.
OoPp1 TIL that dodo birds "could run quite fast" and were "agile and manoeuvrable." The popular image of obese, clumsy dodos probably comes from being overfed in captivity.
OGGKY TIL, that explorer Alexander Mackenzie and crew travelled a total of 4800km by canoe and portage in 1789 to the Arctic Ocean and back from Fort Chipewyan. 4 years later, in 1793, they travelled 3700km from Fort Fork to the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to find new routes for the fur trade.
RVpl TIL that Clint Eastwood bought David Webb Peoples’ script for The Unforgiven in 1976 and sat on it for 15 years until he was old enough to play the lead role of William Munny