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 Stretching more than 125 kilometers south from the An Nafud in a narrow arc is the ad-Dahna desert, a narrow band of sand mountains also called the river of sand. Like the An Nafud, its sand tends to be reddish, particularly in the north, where it shares with the An Nafud the longitudinal structure of sand dunes. The Ad Dahna also furnishes the Bedouin with winter and spring pasture, although water is scarcer than in the An Nafud. The southern portion of the Ad Dahna curves westward following the arc of the Jabal Tuwayq. At its southern end, it merges