The search for a one of the greatest missing treasures of the Second World War - an Amber Room worth £250million - has taken a fresh twist as treasure hunters say it may be in a secret room in a Polish museum.

The room, built for Russian tsar Peter the Great in the 1700s and packed with amber, gold and precious jewels, was stolen by the Nazis and mysteriously disappeared at the end of the Second World War.

For decades, hunters have scoured Europe searching for the missing treasure to no avail.

But now, bosses at the Mamerki museum near Wegorzewo, north east Poland, say it may have been hidden behind a false wall that was sealed shut inside an old wartime bunker - after finding an unknown room measuring 6.5ft wide and 10ft long using geo-radar.

I grew up mostly in Lexington, Mass., where the famed "shot heard round the world" was fired. On my way home from high school each day, I would pass Lexington Green, where colonial militia had assembled on the morning of April 19, 1775, and encountered a force of British redcoats who were on their way to neighboring Concord to confiscate armaments. Shots rang out; eight militiamen died; nine were wounded; the Revolutionary War had begun. The redcoats suffered only one minor wound and continued to Concord, where they found fewer munitions than expected. They spent the rest of the day being routed by superior numbers of militia, on a long and bloody retreat back to their garrison in the city of Boston.

As I walked home, I would pass still-standing Buckman's Tavern, where the militia had assembled before the battle; and continuing my trek up Hancock Street, would pass the Hancock-Clarke House, another historic site. It was here that Samuel Adams and John Hancock - leaders of the revolution in Massachusetts - had been staying the night before the battle. Paul Revere stopped there to see them on his famous "Midnight Ride."

These historic matters were hardly on my mind at the time. However many years later, having written widely on political affairs, I took my son on a tour of historic Lexington at his request, and questions began troubling me.

New research suggests that humans became the large-brained, large-bodied animals we are today because of natural selection to increase brain size. The work, published in the journal Current Anthropology, contradicts previous models that treat brain size and body size as independent traits responding to separate evolutionary pressures. Instead, the study shows that brain size and body size are genetically linked and that selection to increase brain size will "pull along" body size. This phenomenon played a large role in both brain- and body-size increases throughout human evolution and may have been solely responsible for the large increase in both traits that occurred near the origins of our genus, Homo.

"Over the last four million years, brain size and body size increased substantially in our human ancestors," said paper author Mark Grabowski, a James Arthur postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. "This observation has led to numerous hypotheses attempting to explain why observed changes occurred, but these typically make the assumption that brain- and body-size evolution are the products of separate natural selection forces."

'Songs of Consolation', performed at Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge on April 23, is reconstructed from neumes (symbols representing musical notation in the Middle Ages) and draws heavily on an 11th century manuscript leaf that was stolen from Cambridge and presumed lost for 142 years.

Saturday's performance features music set to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius' magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy. One of the most widely-read and important works of the Middle Ages, it was written during Boethius' sixth century imprisonment, before his execution for treason. Such was its importance, it was translated by many major figures, including King Alfred the Great, Chaucer and Elizabeth I.

Hundreds of Latin songs were recorded in neumes from the 9th through to the 13th century. These included passages from the classics by Horace and Virgil, late antique authors such as Boethius, and medieval texts from laments to love songs.

However, the task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not 'notes' as today's musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct 'lost' music from this era - precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University's Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century 'Cambridge Songs'.

By analyzing 18th century mummified remains, Hungarian researchers have found the first direct evidence of a C-section performed on a deceased mother.

The procedure was widely performed in the 18th century on dead mothers in order to attempt baptize the baby while still alive.

"Caesarean section was made exclusively on women who had died in childbirth," Ildikó Szikossy, an anthropologist and senior curator at the Department of Anthropology at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, told Discovery News.

"Indeed, alive patients could have not survived the operation at that time."

"In most cases the baby too died shortly after receiving the sacrament," she added.

Szikossy and colleagues found traces of a sharp-edged 5.7 inch long cut, running from the umbilical ring to the pubic symphysis, in one of the 265 natural mummified bodies kept at the Natural History Museum in Budapest.

The mummies were uncovered in 1994-1995 from a long forgotten crypt in the Dominican church of Vác, a town 22 miles north of the capital on the eastern bank of the Danube river.

"The coffins were beautiful decorated and contain the name, age and age of death of each individual," Szikossy said.

She presented her findings at the International Conference of Comparative Mummy Studies in Hildesheim, Germany. Szikossy and colleagues explained that the mummified remains of a young woman buried with her baby are so far the only evidence for a procedure widely performed in the 18th century.

This week on the Truth Perspective, we interviewed Paul Henry Abram. On the night of Dag Hammarskjold's death in September, 1961, Paul was stationed with the NSA on the Greek island of Crete. Trained in Russian, he regularly monitored communications at the base. That night, he was monitoring radio signals relating to Hammarskjold's flight over the Congo into Northern Rhodesia. What he heard next was shocking: the plane had been shot down.

In 2014 Abram gave his testimony to the Hammarskjold Commission and the UN investigators tasked with following up on its evidence. On the show, he told us the full story, including how he came to work for the NSA, the kind of work he did, and what exactly he heard that fateful night: radio transmissions explicitly indicating that U.S. ground troops took down the plane. Paul eventually left the Air Force in 1963 and began to study law, which he practiced until his retirement in 2004. His memoir Trona, Bloody Trona covers his involvement in "labor's bloodiest struggle since the Embarcadero Strike of 1934".

Following our interview with Abram, SOTT editor Brent joined us for the first installment in a new feature: the Police State Roundup, with the latest stories of police brutality, murder and corruption. We ended the show with a discussion of the infamous 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry into 9/11 report, and what's going on beneath the surface regarding Saudi Arabia's alleged role in 9/11 and their recent rejection of the plan to freeze oil production.

Brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events, the Truth Perspective and Behind the Headlines broadcast every Sunday at 12 pm Eastern.

Running Time: 01:59:44

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When it comes to the origin of Western fairy tales, the 19th century Brothers Grimm get a lot of the credit. Few scholars believe the Grimms were actually responsible for creating the tales, but academics probably didn't realize how old many of these stories really are. A new study, which treats these fables like an evolving species, finds that some may have originated as long as 6000 years ago.

The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne - Thompson - Uther Index, which was compiled in 2004. Although not all researchers agree on the specifics, all modern Indo-European cultures (encompassing all of Europe and much of Asia) descended from the Proto-Indo-European people who lived during the Neolithic Period (10,200 B.C.E. - 2000 B.C.E.) in Eastern Europe. Much of the world's modern language is thought to have evolved from them.

To conduct the study, Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and colleagues scanned the repository. They limited their analysis to tales that contained magic and supernatural elements because this category contained nearly all the famous tales people are familiar with. This narrowed the sample size to 275 stories, including classics such as Hansel and Gretel and Beauty and the Beast.

The first migrants to the Americas were descendants of the human species that arose in Africa and were part of the dispersal of modern humans around the planet, according to a new study published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology.

"We have always assumed that the initial peopling of the Western Hemisphere was a single, unique and independent event," Dennis O'Rourke, a professor of anthropology and Kansas University, said in a news release. "By seeing it as part of a larger global process, everything we learn about other dispersals into geographic areas out of Africa within the last 50,000 years or so are relevant to our understanding of the American case."

New research suggests that the majority of the world's modern Jewish population is descended mainly from people from ancient Turkey, rather than predominantly from elsewhere in the Middle East.

The new research suggests that most of the Jewish population of northern and eastern Europe - normally known as Ashkenazic Jews - are the descendants of Greeks, Iranians and others who colonized what is now northern Turkey more than 2000 years ago and were then converted to Judaism, probably in the first few centuries AD by Jews from Persia. At that stage, the Persian Empire was home to the world's largest Jewish communities.

According to research carried out by the geneticist, Dr Eran Elhaik of the University of Sheffield, over 90 per cent of Ashkenazic ancestors come from that converted partially Greek-originating ancient community in north-east Turkey.

A Belgium-based Egyptologist has discovered the oldest depictions of ancient Egyptian demons, showing that demonic entities populated the ancient Egyptians' imaginations as far back as 4,000 years ago.

Presented recently at the International Conference on Ancient Egyptian Demonology at Swansea University, U.K., these demons gripped their victims and cut off their heads.

Wael Sherbiny, an independent scholar who specializes in the ancient Egyptian religious texts, found two demons on two Middle Kingdom coffins about 4,000 years old.

The third was portrayed in a 4,000-year-old leather roll the researcher had previously discovered in the shelves of the Egyptian museum in Cairo, where it was stored and forgotten for more than 70 years. It was the oldest and longest Egyptian leather manuscript.

"These three demons are already familiar to scholars from ancient texts. However, the depiction of two of them was unknown until now," Sherbiny told Discovery News.

"The drawings show them in either a purely zoomorphic or anthropomorphic representation," he added.