Abstract
Throughout the arid lands of Africa and Eurasia, camelids facilitated the expansion of human populations into areas that would not likely have been habitable without the transportation abilities of this animal along with the organic resources it provides, including dung, meat, milk, leather, wool, and bones. The two-humped, Bactrian, species ofCamelus,C. ferusin its wild state andC. bactrianuswhen domesticated, is much more poorly known in prehistoric archaeological contexts than its single-humped congeneric,C. dromedarius. Our research uses a convergence of evidence approach to analyze reports and remains of Plio-Pleistocene camelids in Central and Northern Asia and trace the latest-known fossil Bactrian relative,Camelus knoblochi, that seems to have survived in the Gobi Desert until the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 26.5–19 ka). Rock art depictions, some of which may be of Pleistocene age, record the complexity of nascent human-camel interactions and provide the impetus for further archaeological studies of both the origins ofC. bactrianusand its increasingly complex relationships with the highly mobile prehistoric peoples of Central and Northern Asia.
Highlights
Camelus knoblochi was the largest of the Pleistocene Eurasian Bactrian members of the genus Camelus
We reviewed published data on fossil camels from China, Kazakhstan and Siberia and employed logarithmic curves, applied earlier in the study of horses (Eisenmann et al, 1986) and bison (Vasiliev 2008), to better visualize these data
The significant width of the fossil camelid first phalanx from the Kamenka site in Siberia allows it to be classified as C. ferus, which suggests that wild two-humped camels were latitudinally distributed from the Gobi Desert, north to western Transbaikalia in southern Siberia during the Late Pleistocene
Summary
Camelus knoblochi was the largest of the Pleistocene Eurasian Bactrian (two-humped) members of the genus Camelus. Devyatkin published the discovery of Pliocene camel remains from Mongolia without accompanying detailed descriptions (Devyatkin 1981) These specimens were found at three localities: Paracamelus sp. The Chusutuin Gol section is situated in the Khustyn Gol Valley and includes deposits with mammalian remains going back to the beginning of Marine Isotope Stage 3 (48.3–45.3 ka BP) (Grunert et al, 2000), corresponding to a rise in the level of Uvs Nuur. These two camelid specimens have only been recently reported and never taxonomically identified or described in detail. A single find of Camelus ferus has been reported from Otson Tsokhio in the Gobi Desert, without complete description (Janz et al, 2021)
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