When it comes to the foreign cards, the TPGs more or less follow the lead of whoever cataloged it first. They don't do independent research. Speaking as a cataloger, sometimes it is really difficult to figure out when a card was issued with any degree of accuracy better than within a few years or a decade. Even well-known sets can have revisions, like the 1933 US Caramel set that was listed as a 1932 set until a careful analysis of the biographies on the cards proved that the issue dated to no earlier than March 1933. I can only imagine how hard it was for the oldtimers to figure out things pre-Internet and pre-Google Translate.
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