Madjedbebe rock shelter, on the park's north-western edge, has yielded stone tools dated to roughly 65,000 years — the oldest secure evidence of human occupation on the Australian continent. That shelter lies inside the same 19,804 square kilometres a 3 Day Kakadu 4WD Camping Tour crosses. Kakadu is larger than Wales. It is not wilderness emptied of people, but a worked, burned and named country. Bininj and Mungguy families hold that country still. The park was proclaimed in stages from 1979, and most of it is Aboriginal land leased back to the Commonwealth and managed jointly with Parks Australia from offices on the Kakadu Highway at Jabiru. UNESCO inscribed the property for natural values in 1981 and for cultural values soon after, placing Kakadu among the small number of World Heritage sites recognised on both counts. 3 Day Kakadu 4WD Camping Tour tours and other Darwin-based Kakadu camping expeditions run under permits issued inside that arrangement. The 25 AUD conservation fee paid by each adult supports ranger patrols, track grading and the care of painted shelters. The park's spine is the Arnhem Land escarpment, a sandstone wall some 500 kilometres long and up to 300 metres high, laid down as beach sand more than a billion years ago. Water falls off it. Jim Jim Falls drops around 200 metres into a plunge pool reached only by a rough sand track; Twin Falls, Maguk and Gunlom cut gorges of their own. Below, the South Alligator River spreads into floodplains that carry magpie geese by the tens of thousands. The 3 Day Kakadu 4WD Camping Tour tour corridor, running between escarpment and billabong, holds close to 280 bird species — roughly a third of Australia's total — along with saltwater crocodiles in nearly every waterway. Rock art gives the park its second measure of depth. At Ubirr, X-ray barramundi and a thylacine, extinct on the mainland for some three thousand years, share stone with Rainbow Serpent figures. At Burrungkuy, long written as Nourlangie, the Anbangbang gallery carries Namarrgon the Lightning Man, repainted in 1964 by the artist Nayombolmi. Some panels lie forty images deep. Estimates put the number of art sites across Kakadu near 5,000, of which fewer than a dozen are open to the public; the rest remain with the families whose ancestors painted them. Every 3 Day Kakadu 4WD Camping Tour therefore follows a thin public seam through a far older and largely private map.