Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
According to Yahoo News a Lapita cemetery on the island of Vanuatu may help anthropologists unravel how the Pacific was first populated. The find is pretty unique in that:
A total of 70 headless bodies, along with seven skulls and some rare pots, have been found at the site in Vanuatu over several dig seasons. The work was led by Spriggs, Stuart Bedford of the Australian National University and Ralph Regenvanu of the Vanuatu National Museum.Thirty-five bodies, buried in various manners, were discovered just recently.
But rather than a ritual sacrifice or some other gruesome custom that might explain the separated heads and bodies, the deceased were all laid to rest initially with their skulls firmly attached, Spriggs said.
The head was believed to be the seat of the soul and so was often dug up after burial when the flesh had rotted away and kept either in skull shrines or in the house as a treasured memento of the person," he told LiveScience.
Curiously, though, none of the skulls belonged to the bodies with which they were buried, tests showed.
"Some curated heads, shiny through handling, had been placed on the chest of one individual some time after his burial--they may have been his descendants," said Spriggs. "Needless to say, he had no head either."
Interestingly enough, I recently read Ian HoddersThe Leopard's Tale. Hodder mentions something similar in connection with some of the burials at Çatalhöyük and even uses Raymond Firth's books on Tikopia to help the reader interpret the Çatalhöyük culture (not that there is a connection between the two, Hodder was just using Tikopia as an analogy).
The burial treatment is explained thusly:
Although we cannot know the meaning of the very complicated rituals which Lapita people conducted upon the death and burial of their relatives, we can see that they must have had a very rich "kastom" life, and the death of someone was an event to be marked in a major way, with ceremonies perhaps continuing years after a person's death. People were buried, then perhaps a year later the skeleton was exposed and the skull and some other bones removed and placed elsewhere. Then later their skulls and other bones might have been buried again, either in a pot or associated with another skeleton, or as a pile of bones in a pit.
DNA testing has been done on some of the skeletons and preliminary results indicate that some of them did not come from Vanuatu:
"At present we don't have enough background data to enable us to say where someone came from in the Pacific, only that they didn't come from the island where they were found," Spriggs said. "Currently, 4 of about 18 individuals tested so far show signs of having been born elsewhere."Those DNA results and more on the way mean that scientists could soon understand just how the Lapita people got to Vanuatu and what route they took from there on to populate islands like Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. Many historians believe they originally made the journey from Southeast Asia, but that is in dispute.
Additionally a number of pots, believed to be the oldest fully reconstructed pots in the Pacific Islands, have been found
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