A bitter wind whipped down the 10-mile-long Chaco Canyon, kicking up swirls of dust among the thorny greasewood and sagebrush bushes. I ducked behind one of the towering sandstone walls in the three-acre ruin, or Great House, known as Pueblo Bonito, to escape the gusts. I was in the section of the 800-room complex where burials took place. Treasure hunters and archaeologists have uncovered in these ruins and tombs delicate white-and-black painted ceramics, flutes, ceremonial sticks, tiny copper bells, inlaid bone, macaw and parrot skeletons, cylindrical jars with the residue of chocolate that would have been imported from Mexico, shells and intricate turquoise jewelry and sculptures. From this vast, bureaucratic and ceremonial complex, the Anasazi-a Navajo word meaning ancient ones or possibly ancient enemies-dominated the Southwest from about the year 850 until the society collapsed in about 1150.

The Chaco ruin, 6,200 feet above sea level, is one of the largest and most spectacular archeological sites in North America. It is an impressive array of 15 interconnected complexes, each of which once had four-to-five-story stone buildings with hundreds of rooms each. Seven-hundred-pound wooden beams, many 16 feet long, were used in the roofs. Huge circular, ceremonial kivas - religious centers dug into the earth, with low masonry benches around the base of the room to accommodate hundreds of worshippers - dot the ruins. It rivals the temples and places built by the Aztecs and the Mayans.

Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer's epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned-and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers-and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.

The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. "The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don't have seafarers until the early Bronze Age," adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. "Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It's a pretty stunning change."

Scholars long thought that the capability to construct and victual a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast arrived only with advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years or so, and convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt's Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. Not until 2000 B.C.E. is there physical evidence that sailors crossed the open ocean, from India to Arabia.

But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don't typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.

Magnetic pole shifts are in the news a lot recently because our Magnetic North Pole is racing towards Russia while the Earth's magnetic field strength is falling fast. The European Space Agency said this could be the beginning of a magnetic pole shift. Evidence suggests the rotational axis will also shift to stay aligned with the magnetic field. These catastrophic pole shifts come in a periodic cycle of recurring and predictable cataclysms involving huge earthquakes and tsunamis, changes in latitude and altitude, mass extinctions, and the destruction of civilizations - reducing them to myth and legend.

New findings link genetic mutation to mammary duct growth as well as shoveled teeth

The critical role that breast feeding plays in infant survival may have led, during the last ice age, to a common genetic mutation in East Asians and Native Americans that also, surprisingly, affects the shape of their teeth.

The genetic mutation, which probably arose 20,000 years ago, increases the branching density of mammary ducts in the breasts, potentially providing more fat and vitamin D to infants living in the far north where the scarcity of ultraviolet radiation makes it difficult to produce vitamin D in the skin.

The mummified remains of Iranian leader Reza Shah Pahlavi may have been found during the excavation of a Shiite shrine in southern Tehran.

Pahlavi ruled Iran during World War Two before being succeeded by his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's last shah, who was overthrown during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The elder Pahlavi had been buried in a nearby mausoleum after his death in 1944 but the tomb was later destroyed by Iranian revolutionaries. The body was never found in the ruins and has been missing for decades.

Hassan Khalilabadi, the head of Tehran City Council's cultural heritage and tourism committee, reportedly told the state news agency IRNA that it was a "possibility" that the remains uncovered at the Shiite shrine of Abdul Azim are those of Reza Pahlavi. Authorities say they will now conduct DNA tests to confirm if the body is indeed Pahlavi.

For a full year, the teenager from Terrebonne devoted at least 15 minutes each day fiddling with the lock on a black file cabinet stored in the back corner of his father's workshop.

It was the only file cabinet left from the hundreds his dad bought in the mid-1980s from the isolated eastern Oregon ranch where the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh improbably had hoped to establish a religious paradise.

The Bhagwan's followers sold all the commune's equipment as the empire collapsed in one of the most bizarre episodes in Oregon history.

References in the mystery papers of Rajneeshpuram are often incomplete, sometimes cryptic, but relatively easy to decipher given the notoriety of the case.

It was an incredible chapter of Oregon's past when worshipers of the Indian guru put down stakes at an empty cattle ranch, battled with the locals, poisoned many and plotted to kill people standing in their way.

Here are some of the more intriguing excerpts from 13 pages found in a folder hidden in a locked file cabinet from the commune and made public here for the first time.

The handwritten notes are in different colored ink, different styles and sometimes highlighted in pink or green.

The margins of the papers list names of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, with information jotted beside each one: Anupa, Devaraj, Devika, Dharmakaya, Suburo.

It could be that those are the people who provided a particular account or who were involved in the actions described, but it's hard to tell.

The authors repeatedly mention members of the commune's inner circle of administrators: Sheela, Puja, Ava, Devarish.

Some of the pages list years: 1982, 1983, summer and fall of 1984 and June 1985.

Passages from the papers are followed here by an explanation of actual events based on news accounts and court documents from the time.

The term "Asperger's syndrome" will never be heard the same way again, owing to new research showing that Hans Asperger-the Austrian pediatrician for whom the disorder was named-was an active participant in the Nazi eugenics program, recommending that patients deemed "not fit for life" be sent to a notorious children's "euthanasia" clinic.

New research published today in the science journal Molecular Autism shows that Asperger wasn't the man he led the public to believe he was. That he worked among the Nazis is no secret, but after the Second World War he said he was no friend of the Nazis. He even claimed that he was hunted down by the Gestapo for refusing to hand over profoundly disabled children. But new work by Herwig Czech, a historian of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, says there's no evidence for these claims, and that the popular conception of Asperger is false. The brutal reality, according to Czech, is that he was both a Nazi sympathizer, and a medical doctor who "actively contributed" to the Nazi eugenics program.

Torun, Poland - About 100,000 years ago, ancient humans started etching lines and hashtag patterns onto red rocks in a South African cave. Such handiwork has been cited as the first sign our species could make symbols-distinct marks that stand for some meaning-and thus evidence of a sophisticated mind. But a new study, reported here this week at Evolang, a biannual conference on the evolution of language, finds that these markings and others like them lack key characteristics of symbols. Instead, they may have been more for decoration or enjoyment.

To come to this conclusion, Kristian Tylén, a cognitive scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, and his team of cognitive scientists and archaeologists took a closer look at dozens of etched red ochre stones found in the cave, known as Blombos Cave. Some scientists have called the markings early forms of art and even evidence of symbolic behavior, such as full-blown language. Tylén's group also looked at a set of ostrich egg shells with engraved lines, parallel lines, and ladderlike images found at another site in South Africa. The markings date to between about 52,000 to 109,000 years ago, after the birth of our species but before widespread artistic expression such as cave paintings of animals.

Tylén figured that if the marks were chiefly decorative, created because someone enjoyed looking at the pattern, the eyes of living humans would be able to see the patterns easily. If the markings were cultural traditions, they would need to be memorable, because the cave dwellers may have had to make them multiple times. And in that case, people today also ought to able to remember and copy them. Over time, the markings from each locality ought to also become more distinct, because a maker in one place wouldn't want the scratches to be confused with those in another place.

Some walkers think they have discovered a site whose origin goes back to the deepest times. Each of their explorations raises new enigmas: for them, it is a "megalithic" site as important as the one of Carnac. They called it "Le Cadran du Pilat".

Two years ago, Thomas de Charentenay was walking in the forest at an altitude of 1200 metres (3900 foot) near the Pierre des Trois Evêques, in the Pilat massif.

Curious, Thomas ventures beyond the path, skirts a series of rocks, and mechanically, begins to count his steps. Surprise: it is the same distance between each stone: 12 steps exactly, 10 meters (32.8 foot) each time, and all aligned due East.