Nell Greenfield Boyce

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.

Jared Isaacman is a businessman who flew to space twice in SpaceX capsules.

On one of those flights, he and a crewmate opened up a hatch and performed the first private spacewalk.

President Trump nominated him to lead NASA, but then abruptly withdrew that nomination in the spring, only to renominate him in November.

Isaacman is becoming administrator as NASA prepares to send astronauts on a trip around the moon next year,

making it the first time people have gone there in more than a half century.

The hardware needed for landing on the moon, however, is still in development.

And Isaacman has said that it's vital for a U.S.

landing to happen before a rival, China, gets astronauts to the lunar surface.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.