Have you ever asked yourself, “What is the size of Yemen?” Yeah, me neither. At least, not until I received this peculiar comment under my video.

I became intrigued, so I googled the size of Yemen, and voila, he wasn't lying. 555,000 sq km – as the first Google response with the same number used by Wikipedia. I wanted to see what went wrong, if this person was right or not, so I tried replicating the borders by drawing them on Google Maps. And…. I arrived at 456,000 km2.

I included all the islands, including Socotra, to ensure I didn't miss anything. There was no possibility of some small border error – the missing area was the size of a quarter of the country.

So how did the 555 claim originate? With the help of Google Books, I managed to find the oldest mention possible:

This is a statistical yearbook published by the Central Statistical Office of Yemen in 1991, the first one after the unification of the country. When I read the paragraph carefully, I noticed one slight problem.…