35 False 'Facts' That You Wrongly Believe (And 1 That You Should)

23. Bats Are Blind

Actually, they're not. If you've ever accused someone of being "blind as a bat", you were actually - and probably unwittingly - proffering quite the compliment, if only about their eyesight. There are two distinctly different lines of bat, evolved from a common ancestor. While one has larger eyes and much more refined eyesight than the other, not a single one of the 1200 or so species of bat suffers with naturally occurring blindness and, in fact, many of them can actually see in the dark better than we humans can. While some are more prone to degraded vision in a low light environment, they can also fall back on a snazzy sonar mechanism called 'echolocation'. This allows the bat to sense distance by sending out high-frequency sounds which come back to it after bouncing off the nearest object. So bats are actually quite a bit cleverer than most of us give them credit for being. And therein lies the curse of the sweeping generalisation based on unsubstantiated fact - sooner or later, someone will prove it wrong!

22. Slaves Built The Pyramids

No, actually they didn't. Not Jewish slaves. Not even Egyptian slaves. It was long thought to be inconceivable that anyone could've voluntarily become one of the thousands of men required to construct these enormous and complex ancient Egyptian structures. But in the early 1990s, it became apparent that they had been. Enough archaeological evidence has been uncovered around The Great Pyramid alone to show that the men working on its construction - estimated to around 10,000 of them over a thirty year period - were allocated comfortable accommodations, were fed meat at least weekly, had good medical care, were most likely well remunerated for their work and were given honourable burials in stone tombs close to the base of the pyramid when they died. It seems likely the majority of them were recruited from poor farming communities on a roughly three-monthly rotational basis, with many coming to the pyramids when their farms had been flooded by seasonal rains. The earliest known record of Jews in Egypt apparently date to some 2,000 years after The Great Pyramid had its topping out ceremony and even then, they were Persian soldiers who later went into combat shoulder-to-shoulder with the Pharaoh's troops - so certainly not slaves.