› added 10 months ago

28

TIL that Vermont not only wasn’t one of the original 13 colonies, but that it was its own country for a few years.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

OGx6L TIL Arguably, the oldest extant European book is the Liber Linteus, an Etruscan book written on linen and dated to the 3rd century BC. The fabric of the book was preserved because it was used for mummy wrappings in Ptolemaic Egypt.
ZOLv TIL that a new Ocean is forming in Africa
AD7gw TIL that people stationed in Antarctica have so much sex that one year the managers had to distribute 16,500 condoms for the ~125 people spending the winter there
Z8v04 TIL Grazing animals such as horses and bison are known to engineer the landscape around them, for example suppressing the growth of trees by trampling or eating saplings. When this process is harnessed to restore an ecosystem to a previous state it is called rewilding.
kWjE TIL that since 1985 the government of Saudi Arabia has destroyed about 95% of the holy city of Mecca in order to make way for the construction of hotels, apartments, parking lots, etc. There are now less than 20 structures that date back to the period of Muhammad.