Nefud Desert

Eight years ago, one ancient multihued lake in the Nefud Desert caught the eye of researchers.

One day about 120,000 years ago, a few humans wandered along the shore of an ancient lake in what is now the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia.

A few years ago he and his colleagues recovered fossils of several extinct Arabian mammals from a site in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert.

In 2016 their colleague Iyad Zalmout, an archaeologist with the Saudi Geological Survey and author on the paper, was prospecting in a site called Al Wusta in the Nefud Desert in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula.

It belongs to an era more than 85,000 years ago when the Nefud Desert where archaeologists discovered it was a freshwater lake surrounded by grasslands, said the scientists who published their find in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.