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TIL about a species of human that grew no larger than a modern 3-year-old child and lived on a remote island in Indonesia 18,000 years ago. These humans lived alongside Homo sapiens. They manufactured sophisticated stone tools, hunted elephants, and more, all with a brain only 1/3 the size of ours.

Read more news.nationalgeographic.com

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KGeE TIL When Patrick Stewart was first asked to consider playing Professor X on film, the actor had no idea who the character was. So when one of the producers handed him an ‘X-Men’ comic from her desk he responded, “What am I doing on the front of a comic book?”
jNWMQ TIL the reason why an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel mid flight in '83, NASA lost its Mars orbiter in '99, and a roller coaster car derailed on Space Mountain in '03 were due to confusion in working with both imperial and metric systems.
wQ7J TIL Alaska was never meant to be separated from the rest of the United States, but would be linked when British Columbia also joined. Instead, the Alaska Purchase compelled British Columbia to join the Canadian Confederation 3 months later.
b9d40 TIL that future US President Ulysses S. Grant ordered all Jews be expelled from areas under his military control in 1862, blaming them for black market cotton trading. Lincoln overruled the order less than a month later.
PYyDE TIL that when David Attenborough's series "Blue Planet II" aired in 2017, so many Chinese fans downloaded the programme on the country’s online Tencent Video channel that the internet in China temporarily slowed down