Why did the Camel die out in the wild?

Factual Questions
1

As I understand it, there are three species of camel. The Dromedary comes from Somalia/Ethiopia; the Bactrians from Asia; and in fact there were two distinct types of Bactrian camels which had split 1 million years ago, one of which was domesticated and went extinct in the wild while the other remains in the wild today but is critically endangered.

Originally these camels crossed over from America (where their descendants would become the Llama, Alpaca, etc) and used to have a much wider range. The Dromedary evolved from a two hummed camel similar to the Bactrian, based on distribution and the fact that dromedary fetuses have two humps.

So far this all makes sense to me, but here’s the part that doesn’t… why did the Dromedary and the ancestor of the domesticated Bactrian camel die out?

Clearly the environment is still suitable for them, since feral or free range domesticated herds are still thriving to this day. But somehow the Dromedary died out in the wild over 2,000 years ago. Is it just a matter of human civilization capturing and domestication any remaining wild herds? Do the domestic herds somehow outcompete the wild ones and drive them extinct? Or am I wrong about the environment being suitable for camels and in fact they would die out in Africa and the Middle East if it wasn’t for human intervention?

2

I am not a biologist, and certainly not a camel expert, but if an animal went extinct in the last few thousand years, you’d have to suspect that human intervention was the main reason.

I imagine that people simply captured and domesticated nearly all of the wild camels.

3

Are you sure there are no wild camels? I don’t know, but just a personal anecdote. A few years ago I was driving in Israel in the north of the Negev desert, and I came across about a dozen camels beside the road. No sign of any people or habitations for miles around. They could have been loosely domesticated I suppose, or feral. Though wouldn’t a feral camel count as ‘wild’?

4

Why has virtually every species of megafauna outside of sub-Saharan Africa gone extinct (or nearly so) or become domesticated? Humans.

5

Yeah, there are plenty of feral camels in Africa, the middle east, and Australia.

Actually, now that I think about it… my main issue was with the idea that 2,000 years ago humans managed to capture and domesticated every her of wild camels. But in fact they wouldn’t need to - they’d just need to ensure there are enough feral camels that they breed into every wild herd, and boom - no more “wild” camels.

6

That’s a fair point- there isn’t a single place on Earth (aside from Sub-Saharan Africa, maybe) that has even half the megafauna diversity that it had 10,000 years ago. I figured humans did it, but the question is how? Overhunting? Habitat destruction? Or as is perhaps more likely, simply flooding any wild herd with feral camels until any ancestral traits that predate domestication were simply overwhelmed?

Maybe it isn’t something we know the answer to yet.

7

I’m pretty sure it’s overhunting. A camel has no defenses against humans - humans and camels haven’t cohabited long enough for them to evolve any. Plus, they have a slow reproduction cycle and the open terrain they live in is perfect for hunting.

8

I’m not sure one can know that humans domesticated ‘every’ herd of wild camels (though I’m sure they gave it a good shot)… :wink:

This seems to be rather a matter of semantics: what does one consider to be a “wild” animal?

9

A feral animal is one descended from domestic populations. This is relevant because domestication involves breeding traits into animals over many generations, so a wild population wouldn’t have any of those traits, while a feral one would.

There is some grey area. For example, it is thought that the black coat of some wolves in the Americas comes from genes that originally appeared in domestic dogs owned by native Americans - the wild wolf doesn’t naturally have the black fur gene, but domestic dogs do.

Sometimes you can tell the difference on sight but with camels a lot of this is determined by genetic testing (that’s how we learned the wild Bactrian camels is a fully separate species that diverged over a million years ago, for example)

10

Speaking of the native Americans, I suppose they did drove the camel to extinction without needing to domesticate them first, so perhaps hunting does make sense as a major contributor.

11

Humans weren’t even domesticating horses until almost 1,000 years after the North American camel went extinct. Their extinction happened during a perfect storm of climate change and the introduction of human hunters 12,000 years ago.

12

Yes, but clearly the Dromedary didn’t go extinct at that time, because that was ages before humans domesticated camels, and there were camels around to domesticate. I’m more curious about how the Dromedary went extinct in the wild around 2000 years ago then about what happened to the North American camels (hunting and climate change)

13

It’s easier to hunt camels when you’re riding a camel.

14

Most likely a combination of hunting wild populations, plus flooding of the genome of any remaining wild populations by escaped domestic individuals that went feral, plus monopolization of the best habitat by domestic herds.

The general explanation for megafaunal extinctions throughout the world has been human impact, due to hunting, habitat alteration, or other effects. Megafaunal extinctions took place over a period of 40,000 years, almost invariably after the documented arrival of humans in an area, regardless of the previous history of climate change. Climate change may have had some impact in some areas, but can’t provide a general explanation.

The wild ancestors of several other domestic animals are extinct. These include the Aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle, the Tarpan, probably close to the ancestor of domestic horses (although the Przewalski wild horse survived), and the subspecies of Gray Wolf that gave rise to the domestic dog (although the species as a whole survives in the wild).

15

Thank you for the details - I knew about the aurochs but hadn’t heard of the Tarpan (your link goes to Aurochs as well btw) - found some interesting reading for later!

I’m not sure why the aurochs analogy didn’t occur to me before. Maybe because the auroch (in pop culture at least) was this big hulking beast - kind of what you’d expect of an “ice age cow” - whereas the wild camel was pretty dang similar to the modern camel (which I suppose is already a huge shaggy beast!) so that ‘of course the huge ice age version is extinct’ feels a bit more… intuitive. But of course in reality an auroch was an animal just like any other, not some ice age monster.

16

Sorry. Fixed.

As the article mentions, the Aurochs became extinct only in 1627. It had an enormous range, even greater than the camel, so the fact that it became extinct everywhere is even more surprising.

17

I am not an expert in camel genetics. But you seem to have answered your own question to your own satisfaction. Why are we still talking about this? I am bowing out of this discussion.

18

Soooo… I think my original question is answered, so here’s another question that may or may not be worth its own thread, but might as well start it here.

We have been wrecking ecosystems since we first left Africa. When you look at the fossil record, megafauna diversity around the world was much, much higher - on par with sub-Saharan Africa if not higher, and with either relatively similar wildlife (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America) or wildly different animals that evolved in isolation (Australia, South America). Then we have a period of climate change and human expansion that seems to deliver a one-two pair of rapid strikes that most ecosystems simply couldn’t handle.

This brings up two questions. First - was sub-Saharan Africa spared from these extinctions, or is it simply a matter of SOMETHING surviving? IE, did each continent have a handful of elephant/mammoth species, of which only the African and Asian elephants survive, or did there use to be a much greater diversity of African elephants, and we are just lucky we kept the one/two species we still have as opposed to losing them all?

And second… we talk about human damage to the ecosystem - for example, to the permafrost/tundra ecosystem of Northern Asia/Russia. But the “Virginia wilderness” we harken back to is in fact the devastated ecosystem left behind after a mass extinction caused by us, right?

Or take North America - my understanding was that the great herds of Buffalo discovered by Europeans weren’t a relic of what ice age North America was like; instead, the fossil record seems to show that bison populations exploded after the native Americans hunted the competition to extinction (I can’t find my source for this so if someone can either confirm or deny this that would be great).

Given all this… what we consider to be “unspoiled nature” is in fact the very artificial world we had unknowingly created over tens of thousands of years, and all that’s special about the conception of nature we have is that it is what nature happened to be like in the 16-1700s when we finally figured out we could influence the world around us despite being mere mortals.

If this is the case, when we decide to “restore nature”, how do we decide how far back to “restore” to? It seems to me that true “restoration” is impossible.

19

Personally, I prefer to think of Aurochs as singular, with Aurochsen as the plural (by analogy with ox and oxen).:wink:

20

Ty, that’s one of those words I’ve read often but said rarely, and that really makes a ton more sense! Great analogy to oxen.