Jessica Cerezo-Roman

At the base of a mountain in Malawi, archaeologists uncovered a big pile of ash and in the middle was the burned bones of a small adult woman.

Jessica Cerezo-Roman is an anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma.

She says it's rare to find any evidence of cremation in hunter-gatherer communities that lived in the Stone Age, and cremation pyres, the wooden structures used to burn bodies, are almost never preserved.

In the journal Science Advances, she and her colleagues say the large amount of wood collected suggests this cremation was a communal effort, and the cremated woman's head is missing, suggesting it might have been kept as a relic.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

At the base of a mountain in Malawi, archaeologists uncovered a big pile of ash, and in the middle was the burned bones of a small adult woman.

Jessica Cerezo-Roman is an anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma.

She says it's rare to find any evidence of cremation in hunter-gatherer communities that lived in the Stone Age, and cremation pyres, the wooden structures used to burn bodies, are almost never preserved.

In the journal Science Advances, she and her colleagues say the large amount of wood collected suggests this cremation was a communal effort, and the cremated woman's head is missing, suggesting it might have been kept as a relic.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.