Humanity has grown so old that it has forgotten its infancy, and the origin of man is shrouded in mystery.

Conventional wisdom states that humanity was primitive in the past and then things started evolving until people emerged from the state of barbarism to become smarter and more capable. New evidence however suggests otherwise; it suggests that maybe the dawn of history was characterized by forgotten high science and technology that far exceeds modern man's expectations of the distant past.

This view is as old as history. The ancients spoke of their past as being glorious. The account of Atlantis in Plato's dialogues Timaeus is the most vivid memory we have of this golden age.

The Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, concluded by Europe's major powers with Adolf Hitler, allowed the Nazis to absorb parts of Czechoslovakia and hammered the final nail in the coffin of the concept of European collective security pushed ahead by the USSR, Canadian professor of history Michael Jabara Carley told Sputnik.

On September 30, 1938 in Munich, Europe's major powers (Britain, Germany, France and Italy), excluding Moscow and Prague, negotiated an agreement permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia, paving the way for Hitler's European triumphant march; the agreement marked the failure of the USSR's numerous attempts to build a European anti-Hitler coalition.

"Beginning in late 1933, the Soviet government pursued a policy of collective security in Europe. It was League of Nations jargon, but in reality it was plain old great power alliance building. The Soviet idea was to contain Nazi Germany, or to defeat it in war, should containment fail. Soviet diplomats tried to promote their policy just about everywhere in Europe and in the United States. At first the USSR made progress, but one by one, Soviet would-be allies fell away. I call it the Grand Alliance that Never Was," Professor Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal told Sputnik.

Search parties failed to locate the plane and the case was quickly classified

Back in 1935, a plane carrying 12 people and two million roubles - the equivalent of millions of pounds today - was lost over Russia. Now, the mystery of its disappearance appears to have been solved.

The Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boat took off from the town of Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinksy in Russia's far east on 26 June 1935 carrying the passengers and money collected from a local tractor repair workshop. An hour and 15 minutes into the flight to the regional capital of Khabarovsk, communication was lost with the plane.

Search parties failed to locate the plane and the presence on board of two officers from Stalin's secret police - the NKVD - who were there to guard to the cash, meant the case was quickly classified, before being shut down shortly after.

However, a search group from a Russian NGO that seeks out the remains of people killed in accidents said yesterday that it had discovered the bodies of three men and one woman from the air disaster in a remote area of Russia's Khabarovsk region.

"The passengers were still lying where they fell, thrown out of the wooden cabins of the plane along with the remains of the seating and seat belts. Around them lay their personal items," the Russia Search Movement (RSM), said.

The incident became shrouded in local legend - rumours of foul play by a third party trying to steal the money were told.

Suspected wreckage from the plane was reported by loggers in 2006. Preparations by RSM for an expedition to the apparent crash site lasted almost a year. The team of volunteers said that when they reached the site earlier this summer, having traversed over 2,000 miles through the Siberian taiga forest, they found it had been ransacked by treasure hunters. They did not recover the two million roubles.

The team did, however, reconstruct the likely last moments of the plane, which apparently ran into low cloud shortly after taking-off from the island of Sakhalin.

Descending to a low altitude in an attempt evade the cloud and use the Amur river as a guide to reach Khabarovsk, the pilot slammed into the side of a hill.

Seventy years after the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, a number of important historical details about the conflict have been forgotten by the US public. These facts may be unknown or ignored by the people of the United States, but much of the world hasn't forgotten them, and they have relevance in relation to current events.

1. Hitler was a right-winger

Endless books and articles, such as "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg, have attempted to paint Adolph Hitler as some kind of leftist. These texts often play up the fact that the Nazi Party's official name contained the word "Socialist," or that Hitler's speeches sometimes talked of "revolution."

Regardless of what Glenn Beck and much of the US media would prefer to be the case, Adolph Hitler considered himself to be a right-winger. In his speeches and writings, he frequently referred to his Nazi organization as the "Party of the Right."

When establishing the Nazi Party in the early 1920s, Hitler made abundantly clear that he was on the right wing of the political spectrum, saying: "There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction — to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power — that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. Here, too, there can be no compromise — there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew. "

Toxicology is a branch of knowledge dealing with the scientific study of the characteristics and effects of poisons on living organisms. The man considered to be the 'father' of this discipline is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, also known as Paracelsus. It is said that Paracelsus meant 'equal to Celsus' (referring to the Roman encyclopaedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus), and the change in his name was meant to be an indication of Paracelsus' desire to rival ancient medical authorities such as Celsus and Galen.

Following in His Father's Footsteps

Paracelsus was born in 1493 in Einsiedeln, Schwyz, the Old Swiss Confederacy (modern day Switzerland). Paracelsus' father, Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, was a Swabian nobleman said to have been born out of wedlock in an impoverished family of knights. Wilhelm was himself a physician, and was mentioned by Paracelsus to be one of his earliest teachers. When Paracelsus' mother, Els Ochsner, died when he was just nine years old, the father and son moved to Villach in Carinthia. By watching his father giving medical comfort and aid to visiting pilgrims, the young Paracelsus developed a desire to emulate his father. Wilhelm also nurtured Paracelsus' growing interest by teaching him the basics of medicine. Furthermore, Wilhelm gave his son herbs and stones, water and metals, as friends, thus initiating him into the wonders of nature.

The remains of the last Russian emperor and his wife have been exhumed, while the Interior Ministry's Investigative Committee has reopened an investigation into the early 20th century murder of the Romanov family.

Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin announced the renewal of the case due to new evidence in an official statement online.

The investigators will have to study archival materials related to the enquiry conducted between 1918 and 1924 by former Russian Imperial officers. These documents were found sometime after 2011 along with some new material evidence.

Additionally, at request of the Russian Orthodox Church, a special working group on studying and burying the remains of the last Russian emperor's son Aleksey and daughter Maria was formed in July 2015 with the burial plans announced this month.

The working group has exhumed the remains of Nicolas II and his wife and took DNA samples to verify the identity of remains supposedly belonging to Aleksey and Maria that were unearthed in 2007.

The group aims to verify Aleksey and Maria's identity by comparing them to the remains of their aunt, the empress's sister Elizaveta Feodorovna, and to the emperor's grandfather, Alexander II.

Scientists digging at the site of a demolished hotel in the heart of Moscow have unearthed the oldest street archeologists have ever had a chance to study, they report. The medieval street connected the Kremlin with the bank of the Moskva River.

The find is located in a historic city area called Zaryadye, east of the Kremlin. The name means 'behind the rows' and refers to the marketplace that was next to the fortress. Wealthy merchants and warriors lived there and did business.

The area saw demolishing and massive construction effort in the 1930s that completely changed Zaryadye and left behind a formidable foundation from an abandoned project of a gigantic ministerial building.

In 1967, the infamous Rossiya Hotel was constructed on that foundation, but after decades of service the Moscow authorities decided to demolish it in 2007. With the gigantic building gone, archeologists got a chance to excavate one of the oldest parts of the Russian capital.

The dig produced a trove of historic artifacts from the medieval times, when Zaryadye was a major trade hub in Moscow, scientists of the Archeology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported Wednesday.

Those include what used to be the street called Velikaya (Great), which led from the Kremlin to a pier on the Moskva River to the south. The 6.5-meter-wide street appeared on the maps during the early stages of the city's expansion in 12th-13th centuries.

An international team of researchers has unearthed the oldest case of decapitation in the New World — a 9,000-year-old skull buried in Brazil with two severed hands covering the face.

The grave was excavated in 2007 in the rock shelter of Lapa do Santo, an archaeological site which has yielded 26 human burials dating to the early Holocene period. It consisted of a circular pit covered with five limestone cobbles.

There, the archaeologists found a skull with the palms of severed hands arranged over the face in opposite direction.

The right hand was laid over the left side of the face with the fingers pointing to the chin, while the left hand covered the right side of the face, the fingers pointing to the forehead.

A jaw and the first six cervical vertebrae, all bearing v-shaped cut marks, completed the assemblage.

"Using cranial morphology and tooth wear, this individual was estimated to be a young adult male," André Strauss from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany and colleagues wrote in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Ancient human remains of up to 50 individuals have been found by workmen during the demolition of a Westminster Abbey toilet block.

The bones are thought to have belonged to people from the 11th or 12th centuries, with the body of a small child found amid the remains of 50 adults.

"What the child is doing there is one of the many unanswered questions," Westminster Abbey's archeologist Warwick Rodwell told the Guardian.

"It is a feature of many ecclesiastical sites that you find the remains of women and children in places where you might not quite expect them," Rodwell added.

The child was buried in a wooden coffin, leading experts to believe that he or she was a person of some importance.

The remains were found as workmen demolished a 1950s-era lavatory block in order to make room for a new tower space through which visitors will eventually be able to access the abbey's attic.

In local folklore, Bla Jungfrun Island has long been associated with dark curses and witchcraft. Off the coast of Sweden, the island has a history of bad luck and a reputation for magic, and even now visitors to the island must not stray off the paths, or stay after nightfall. Archaeologists investigating caves on Blå Jungfrun believe that strange rituals and performances dating back 9,000 years might have been held in the caves.

The uninhabited island, now a national park situated in the Kalmar Straight along the east coast of Sweden, is mostly bare rock and dense forests, and sports an ancient labyrinth, but it is the caves which interest the team of researchers from Kalmar County Museum and Linnaeus University of Sweden.