An Nafud not include entering the Nafud, as is depicted in the film "Lawrence of Arabia". The discovery of an 85,000-year-old fossilised human finger in An Nafud in 2016 by Dr Mathieu Duval of Griffith University provided the earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa and the Levant. An Nafud An Nafud or Al-Nefud or The Nefud () is a desert in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula at , occupying a great oval depression. It is long and wide, with an area of . The Nafud is an erg, a desert region located in the north-central Saudi Arabia. Noted for
Geography of Saudi Arabia runs north to south through the area of Riyadh. In the south, a coastal plain, the Tihamah, rises gradually from the sea to the mountains. Hejaz extends southward to the borders of mountainous Yemen. The central plateau, Najd, extends east to the Jabal Tuwayq and slightly beyond. A long, narrow strip of desert known as Ad Dahna separates Najd from eastern Arabia, which slopes eastward to the sandy coast along the Persian Gulf. North of Najd a larger desert, An Nafud, isolates the heart of the peninsula from the steppes of northern Arabia. South of Najd lies one of the