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The earliest humans to set foot here were probably a group of Homo erectus who stumbled onto the place a few hundred thousand years ago as they joined north-west across the Sahara from East Africa. It's believed that in those days what is now arid desert was covered in forest, scrub and savanna grasses, much like the plains of Kenya and Tanzania today.
The earliest hard evidence of human inhabitation was unearthed near the southern oasis town of Kebili and dates back about 200,000 years.