The people who built the observatory - three millenniums before the emergence of the Incas - are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and science that archeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later.

Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture - an ancient version of the modern frowning "sad face" icon flanked by two animals. The disk, protected from looters beneath thousands of years of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice.

"It's really quite a shock to everyone ... to see sculptures of that sophistication coming out of a building of that time period," said archeologist Richard L. Burger of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the discovery.

The find adds strong evidence to support the recent idea that a sophisticated civilization developed in South America in the pre-ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery sometime after 1500 BC.

Benfer's discovery "pushes the envelope of civilization farther south and inland from the coast, and adds the important dimension of astronomy to these ancient folks' way of life," said archeologist Michael Moseley of the University of Florida, a noted Peru expert.

The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is about 25 miles inland in the Rio Chillon Valley, just north of Lima. "It is on a totally barren, rock-covered hill looking down on a beautiful fertile valley," said Benfer, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting of the Society for American Archeology.

The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it rains in the area only about once a year.

The name of the people who inhabited the region is unknown because writing did not emerge in the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some archeologists call them followers of the Kotosh religious tradition. Others call them late pre-ceramic cultures of the central coast. For brevity, most simply call them Andeans.

Benfer and archeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The site contains ruins dating from 10,000 years ago to well into the ceramic era in the first millennium BC.

The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near the center of the site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned twigs found in the temple's offering pit place its use at about 2200 BC.

That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt and about the same time that the peoples who would become the Greeks were settling into the Mediterranean region.

The temple is built of rock that was covered with plaster and painted, although most of the white and red paint has long since flaked off.

Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is carved inside a painted picture of another animal, probably a llama, beside each doorway. According to Andean myth, the fox taught people how to cultivate and irrigate plants.

As the team mapped out the site, Benfer observed that a person standing in the doorway of the temple and gazing through a small, flap-covered window behind the altar is aligned with a small head carved onto a notch of a distant hill. The line had an orientation of 114 degrees from true north, pointing southeast.

Benfer does not normally deal with archeoastronomy - the science of ancient astronomy - so he contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins of Tustin, and asked him what that angle signified.

Adkins, a physicist who is retired from Rockwell International and who now teaches astronomy at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees pointed the way to sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere's summer solstice, Dec. 21, the longest day of the year.

"That really got the ball rolling," Adkins said.

The summer solstice marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins its annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher up in the Andes. The flooding deposits fresh soil on the land, fertilizing the crops and eliminating the need for manure from domestic animals.

"This was the beginning of flood-plain agriculture," Benfer said. He thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow cotton for use in making fishing nets.

The large frowning disk sits near the door to the temple. It is made of mud plaster and grass and covered with a fine surface of clay.

Benfer speculates that the sculpture represents Pacha Mamma, the most important god of the Andes. He acknowledges the difficulty of proving that, however, because the next known sculpture of the mother goddess does not appear until 800 BC.

"The disk would frown over the sunset on the winter solstice, the last day of harvest," Benfer said.

Alignments in the temple also pointed to the position at the summer solstice of a constellation known in Andean culture as the fox, Benfer said.

Unlike Western constellations, which are outlined by groupings of stars, some Andean constellations were made from dark areas in the sky that are gaps in the bright Milky Way.

Scientists once thought that the gaps represented a lack of stars, but astronomers now know that they are caused by large clouds of dust that block light from distant stars.

The so-called dark cloud constellation of the fox is well-known today in the region, but archeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate University doubted that it has maintained its shape for four millenniums.

"He has an alignment. That's neat," Aveni said. But the idea that the ancients were looking at the same constellation "is a bit of a leap for me."

Last summer, Benfer's team also partially excavated a second sculpture, that of a life-sized human figure playing a pipe. The figure is sitting with its legs sculpted in high relief and hanging over the edge of one of a series of short platforms that lead down to what appears to be another temple.

The remaining 18 acres of the site have a variety of buildings, most of them from later cultures, that include a ceremonial center, stepped pyramids and what apparently was a residence center for elites. Most of those have been looted.

Oval houses that probably served as homes for families of commoners sit across a ravine from the main pyramid.

There were probably other buildings farther down the slopes, Benfer said, "but the Chillon River removes everything from time to time."

Evidence of pottery indicates that the site was inhabited for centuries, but it is not yet clear whether or how it was eventually abandoned.

"There were people in the valley at the time of the Spanish Conquest, but they were of several ethnic groups," Benfer said.

That suggests that the sophisticated civilization was eventually replaced by small bands of farmers who immigrated from various areas.

The focus of the RAS discussion was the history and status of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - an endeavour that has largely relied so far on large radio telescopes listening for electromagnetic signals from other technological civilisations.

Little additional cost

Crawford thinks scientists will be keen for the next lunar astronauts to sift through the lunar soil in greater quantities and in more detail was possible during the Apollo era. So there would be little additional cost to remain open to the idea that alien material may exist within those upper metres of the moon's regolith.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, says the possibility of such an interesting payoff for little additional cost makes the idea of looking for artefacts worth considering.

"On the Moon, I think it's certainly worthwhile taking a couple hundred square feet or so of material and looking it over," he says. But SETI researchers "probably wouldn't bet their mortgages on finding anything".
Message in a bottle

Looking for small artefacts, or even probes or time capsules, in our solar system is not a new idea in the SETI community, Shostak notes. Indeed, our own civilisation has already taken this approach several times.

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft carry metal plaques showing the spacecraft's time and place of origin. And the Voyager 1 and 2 probes carry gold-plated records (pictured) bearing messages, images and sounds depicting life on Earth for any extraterrestrials who might encounter them thousands of years from now.

In 2004, an engineer and a physicist published a paper in Nature suggesting that if extraterrestrials were not in a hurry, their best shot at making contact with other civilisations would not be with radio waves, but with an interstellar message in a bottle - a physical artefact to tell other intelligent life forms something about their existence.

Crawford says the moon would be a good target for such "inscribed matter", given its lack of geologic activity and airless environment. But if an intentional targeting of a relatively small body sounds a little too like 2001: A Space Odyssey, he says there is also a possibility first brought to his attention by a 1998 paper by Ukrainian astronomer Alexy Arkhipov.

This suggests that if enough space faring societies have existed, even if they never travelled beyond their own planetary systems, they may have produced enough space debris to make it possible that micron-sized particles could have reached our own solar system. And Crawford says such tiny material could have fallen to the moon, remaining there within the top 10 or 15 metres of regolith.
Excruciating detail

But several lunar experts describe the prospect of finding extraterrestrial artefacts on the moon as "far-fetched". Gary Lofgren, lunar curator in charge of the scientific preservation of the Apollo lunar samples at the Johnson Space Center in Houston says even if such extraterrestrial micron-sized particles are there, it would be incredibly difficult to find them, requiring special instrumentation that has never been sent to space before.

Apollo astronauts brought a total of 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of lunar material to Earth and researchers are still studying the samples today. Lofgren says: "People have gone through the samples in excruciating detail and haven't found anything that would suggest extraterrestrial activity."

In fact, he says, scientists have even been surprised by how little of the material has been assigned an origin off the moon - rocks from Earth or Mars thrown up by meteorite impacts, for example.

Still, Lofgren says, scientists will be eager to study new samples from the Moon, noting that the Apollo samples only cover six sites clustered around the equator. And he says, a discovery of material that cannot be explained by an origin and evolution within our solar system "would be an incredible find".

Scott Hubbard, former director of NASA's Ames Research Center and now a SETI Institute researcher says: "While nothing is impossible, I find the payoff from seeking a cometary in-fall in the Moon's permanently shadowed craters much more compelling than extraterrestrial civilisation artefacts."

The high-tech method of resolving the ancient question of "Would we prefer a boy or a girl?" has raised ethical concerns and fears that it could worsen an already worrying gender imbalance plaguing countries such as China and India.

But for couples like the Vatkins, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, which proponents boast gives parents a 99 percent certainty of delivering a baby of the sex of their choice, the procedure is a godsend.

"This treatment has allowed us to realise our dream," said 36-year-old Vatkin, who recently gave birth to her fourth child, a pre-selected girl.

"We were desperate to have another girl and our daughter really wanted a sister," said Vatkin, who also has a six-year-old daughter and two boys, aged four and two, with her husband Shawn, an oil company owner.

"It was important for us to balance our family," added the resident of British Columbia.

Family balancing is the refrain heard from most of the 2,000 couples who have sought the help of fertility expert Doctor Jeffrey Steinberg, who became a pioneer in the field of commercial gender selection about three years ago.

"Usually these couples have four of five children of one sex and desperately want one of the opposite sex, they want to balance their families in a way that works for them," Steinberg told AFP.

For more than two years, the Vatkins, children in tow, made the 2,100-kilometer (1,300-mile) pilgrimage from their home to Steinberg's Fertility Institute in Los Angeles in a bid to overcome their fertility problems and to ensure that when the baby did come, it would be a girl.

Other couples come from much further afield. More than 50 percent of the couples that come to Steinberg for help are from outside the United States.

Would-be parents from territories such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Britain and Canada are flocking to Steinberg's Los Angeles and Arizona clinics.

"They come from everywhere that it's banned by law," Steinberg said. "But in the United States we really guard and cherish reproductive choice and we are very reticent to allow the government to impinge on that."

Using techniques made possible by the discovery of the human genome, eggs are removed from the mother after she undergoes fertility treatment to multiply them and are fertilised with the would-be father's sperm in a laboratory dish.

One of the cells in each embryo is then removed to allow scientists to determine from its DNA whether the embryo is male or female, before one of the desired gender is implanted into the mother's womb to gestate.

But some bioethicists say the technique could aggravate gender imbalances in some communities and could be the start of a slide towards designer babies and cloning if parents are ever able to pre-select their children's hair colour or personal talents.

In countries such as China and India, boys are culturally favoured as first children, abortions of foetuses following amniocentesis gender tests and even infanticide have combined to see a huge decline in the birthrate of girls.

"In some places, the impact for sex ratios would be pretty dramatic if people had the complete power to chose the gender of their child," said Stamford University bioethicist David Magnus.

He however stressed that because PGD was an expensive and complex technique, it was unlikely to be widely used either in the developing world or even in the United States.

But there may be a risk of creating a culture of perfectly-planned "designer babies," he warned.

"With new technology, there are fears that we may be heading towards a future where only the poor are fat or bald, that we are heading towards creating a genetic underclass and genetic overclass," Magnus said.

The process also rings alarms bells among conservative Christians amid concerns over the fate of unused embryos left over in the process, since many believe human life begins when the embryo is formed.

But Steinberg dismisses the three-pronged criticism of the gender selection process.

He stresses that his clients mostly opt to keep fertilised eggs in his eggbank rather than discard them. He said the technique was more humane than the current trend of aborting foetuses or dumping female babies in India and China.

Overall, his clients were divided evenly over which sex they would prefer for the baby. Americans and Canadians favour girls, Indians and Chinese want boys, and Latin Americans are split down the middle.

Steinberg also denied that the technique was the start of a trend towards designer babies or even human cloning.

"We are not moving in the direction of designer babies or cloning at all," he said. "People have been warning of that slippery slope since the first in-vitro baby was born more than 25 years ago, but we haven't gone down it yet."

For the Vatkins, critics' fears are overplayed.

"This treatment really is miraculous for couples like us and especially for those who have, say, three girls and really want a boy," Melissa Vatkin said. "A lot of people don't agree, but then they shouldn't do it."

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"Based on the understanding we have now, there are a large number of factors that sort of have to come together for this to come into play," said Dr. Daniel Schultz, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "That is what makes this more different than your average user-error scenarios."

The company suspended U.S. sales of MoistureLoc on April 13 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was investigating a spike in infections in Americans using the product. The outbreak first surfaced in the Far East, leading to a halt in sales in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia on Feb. 18.

The fungus is commonly found in plant material and soil in tropical and subtropical areas, with strains often showing up in sinks, drains or bathrooms where people handle their lenses. Without treatment, which can last two to three months, the infection can scar the cornea and blind its victims.

The sharp rise in infections brought a flurry of product-liability lawsuits. One woman in Florida alleges the solution caused her to lose an eye, and at least eight other people underwent cornea transplants.

"Bausch & Lomb's top priority is the safety of our customers, and we want them to have complete confidence in our products," Chief Executive Ronald Zarrella said in announcing that MoistureLoc was being removed immediately from markets worldwide.

Extensive federal inspections of the Greenville, S.C., factory where MoistureLoc was made for U.S. and several Asian markets have not turned up evidence of "contamination, tampering, counterfeiting or sterility failure," Zarrella said.

"That leads us to conclude that some aspect of the MoistureLoc formula may be increasing the relative risk of Fusarium infection in unusual circumstances. We are continuing to investigate this link but, in the meantime, we're taking the most responsible action ... by discontinuing the MoistureLoc formula."

"At this time," the FDA added in a statement, "we recognize that Bausch & Lomb has proposed the formulation as the potential root cause of the increased relative risk of Fusarium keratitis."

Schultz said a monthlong investigation of the factory would likely find some manufacturing issues but he downplayed their significance.

Based on ways the solution is handled, its otherwise acceptable fungicidal properties "can deteriorate to the point where they no longer prevent the growth of this fungus in and around the (lens) case," Schultz said. Infections, he added, may involve contamination with "other material" that occurs in the environment.

The CDC said the number of confirmed cases of Fusarium keratitis in the United States has climbed to 122, most of them contact-lens wearers who reported using MoistureLoc.

The company stressed that the recall is limited to MoistureLoc and does not involve other solutions in its ReNu line, including the older and more widely used MultiPlus brand that some victims reported using.

Of the more than 30 million Americans who wear contact lenses, about 2.3 million use MoistureLoc, which was introduced in late 2004 and accounted for $100 million in global sales last year. Another 11 million people use the MultiPlus solution.

Bausch & Lomb shares, which peaked at $87.89 in July after more than two years of robust growth, had sunk 35 percent this year before jumping $5.64, or 12.7 percent, to close at $50.08 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors who had worried that "this was an issue not just for ReNu with MoistureLoc but for the entire ReNu family of products" were heartened "by the strength and conviction of the FDA statements in saying that they too thought the problem was limited to MoistureLoc," said Steve Hamill, an analyst with Piper Jaffray.

Some eye specialists theorized that MoistureLoc's new disinfectant, Alexidine, along with poor hygiene habits and other "real-world" factors, appear to have prompted the outbreak.

"It's very much like an airline accident in that there's a whole bunch of discrete factors that are all failing, any one of which would probably not be in and of itself serious, but in combination it becomes catastrophic," said Dr. Arthur Epstein, chairman of the American Optometric Association's contact lens and cornea section. "There has to be some failure in the solution doing its disinfecting job."

"In the end," he added, "this will result in much safer contact-lens care than we've ever had."

Bausch & Lomb also makes contact lenses, ophthalmic drugs and vision-correction surgical instruments, generates more than $2 billion in annual revenues and employs 12,400 people. The company has not issued guidance for 2006 and said it cannot estimate how the recall will affect results this year.

The park confirmed the killing in a statement, saying: "In an area where Sloth bears, great apes and Barbary macaques have coexisted peacefully for a long time, the harmony was temporarily disturbed during opening hours on Sunday."

"Of course the habitats here in the safari park are arranged in such a way that one animal almost never kills another, but they are and remain wild animals," it said.

Witness Marco Berelds posted a detailed report on the incident, including photos, on a Dutch Web site. He said one Sloth bear tried unsuccessfully to shake the monkey loose after it took refuge on the structure, built of crossing horizontal and vertical poles.

Ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it, the bear climbed onto a horizontal pole, and, standing stretched on two legs, "used its sharp canines to pull the macaque, which was shrieking and resisting, from its perch."

The bear then brought the animal to a concrete den, where three bears ate it.

The zoo said it "usually wasn't possible" for keepers to intervene when an animal killed another.

The park plans now to move the Barbary macaques - which are large monkeys but often inaccurately called "Barbary Apes" - to another part of the park, it said.