Early people of the Arabian peninsula came through the Levant region c. 8000. Hunter gatherer nomads, they vie for territory with wolves, tigers, lions, leopards and striped hyenas.
See also:
Humans are just one of the predators hunting the wild dromedary, gazelles, the plump rock hyrax, and reaping the bounty of the fertile mountain slopes and valleys. By the Bronze Age the Arabian Peninsula offers a paradise of abundance.
The home of the first known camel type animal, Protylopus, is North America. Now extinct, Protylopus lived in North America during the upper Eocene, 56 - 34 million years ago.
See also:
A later mass extinction of mammals works in favor of the Camelus species. Growth and expansion flourish. The camels migrate over the Bering Strait. They spread into Asia, eastern Europe and Africa.
This miniature forerunner of the camel has four toes and no obvious hump. It's the oldest and smallest known camel, with an average length of 80 cm (2 ft).
See also:
By the Pleistocene, 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, ancestors of the dromedary are plentiful in the Middle East and North Africa. In the hot, arid regions of western Asia, the modern dromedary evolves from the Bactrian two-humped camel.
The Bactrian is the most closely related to the ancestral Old World camels. Fossilized camels are found showing evolution of the dromedary, including one with a smaller anterior hump, and the two-humped fetus of a fossilized dromedary mother.
See also:
The dromedary (Camelus dromedarius) of the Arabian regions is the tallest camel, with males measuring 2.2–3.6 m (7 ft 3 in – 11 ft 10 in) at the shoulder. Females are 1.7–1.9 m (5 ft 7 in – 6 ft 3 in) tall.
A jawbone of a dromedary, dating from 8,200 BCE, was found on the south coast of the Red Sea. Dromedaries have sand colored fur of pale to darker brown. The hump is about 20 cm (8 in) tall. It contains fat held together by fibrous tissue.
See also:
The dromedary or Arabian camel is an ungulate, browsing on greenery to regurgitate and chew as cud later. Its stomach has three chambers.
When the camel first swallows food it travels to a stomach chamber to be broken and partially fermented. This is regurgitated later as cud, which the camel breaks down even further by chewing. Thus it can fill its stomach where food is plentiful and keep up a steady flow of nutrients while on the road.
See also:
Dromedaries well equipped for desert environments. Their bottom teeth are sharp and long for cropping, and they have two upper canine teeth for breaking up woody plants.
They also have two upper front teeth, unlike sheep and goats who have none. The feet of the dromedary are not true hoofs. They're two wide, soft toes grown together except for a small wedge.
See also:
The width and flexibility of its feet help the dromedary flee into desert sands where predators sink down and can't pursue. The camel has bushy eyebrows and thick multi-layered eyelids to protect against whipping desert sands, and can fully close its nostrils.
Hardy and less prone to disease than livestock like cattle and sheep, camels have been known to vomit if badly or stressfully treated. In this case they aren't sick, just nervous. They can be prone to diseases such as trypanosomiasis, carried by the parasite of a tsetse fly.
See also:
Dromedaries form herds of about twenty individuals, under a dominant male. They're browsers, eating desert vegetation and grasses. Females take turns leading the herd while the dominant male is in charge of security. If the herd joins another, he ensures no bachelors try to put moves on his ladies.
The male camel has a soft palate on the roof of his mouth. During mating season he inflates it and lets it dangle from the side of his mouth. It can be mistaken for a tongue. Apparently lady camels can't resist a plump pink palate.
See also:
Dromedaries show displeasure by snapping at antagonists without biting, or stamping their feet. Otherwise they're rarely aggressive, except for rutting males.
A dromedary can lose up to 30% of body water content without health problems, another desert adaptation. Humans are dead at half that. Camels don't store water in their humps.
Camels have excellent vision and a keen sense of smell. They have good memories. Camels remember their homes and females can recall the place they gave birth the first time.
See also:
Wild dromedaries no longer exist in Africa and the Middle East. The animals are fully domesticated by c. 2000 BCE. Early animal husbandry and selective breeding comes c. 1000 BCE. A population of wild dromedaries lives in Australia.
It's illegal to hunt camels in Arizona. The US Army brought camels into the desert states believing they would ease transportation of men and supplies.
See also:
The Civil War puts an end to any camel testing, and some camels escape to form herds in the desert. The last camel verified is in 1917, though later sightings up to the 1950s have been reported.
See also: