But on the other side of the frontier, across the no-man’s land in a dry sloping wadi and along our bleak route, gun-toting RSF fighters in camouflage uniforms patrol this part of Sudan.

The results showed the tools were likely to have been used approximately 84 thousand years ago and then abandoned on the banks of the wadis and subsequently buried over time.

The desert riverbed, or wadi, had already subsided back to a trickle.

A series of bridges had crossed the wadi, connecting the port area with the western side of the city.

An academic published a paper in 2022 said that repeated flooding threatened the dams built in a wadi, a usually dry riverbed, above the city and urged immediate maintenance.