Presumably, if you keep more recent dates, you will never need more than 256 possible year values that exactly match a single byte. This saves you a significant amount of space: instead of using a few bytes to store the integer 1901, the 1900 years of which can in many cases be considered redundant, MySQL internally considers it as just number 1 and displays it in 1901 for your benefit.
If you need more years, use an INT based type.
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