Ben Jones suspected he had found something special when he squeezed into a volcanic cave and saw pale wooden poles, some with ends shaped like a willow leaf. When he crawled in farther, he found a cache of items — several paddles and a spear with a stone tip that was still attached. Jones, now with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering, was then with the U.S. Geological Survey on a NASA grant to study perma