The 59 skeletons were found in 1964, lying together in a grave site beside the Nile near what is now the Egyptian-Sudanese border. They died between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago, and some of them seemed to have died in battle.
That was big news half a century ago, when most people still believed that organized killing was an invention of civilization. Now they are back in the news, billed as evidence of the world's oldest known battle.
The skeletons were first dug up in haste, as part of a "salvage dig" to rescue archaeological artifacts that would soon be covered by the 500-km lake rising upstream from the new Aswan High Dam. They got little further attention until two years ago.