THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF CAMELS IN NORTH AMERICABy Anna Harnes
February 4, 2023
From the "Grunge" website.Though the idea of camels generally conjures scenes from Arabian caravans or an oasis in the desert, camels once roamed across the Americas, just as they do in Africa and Asia. While there aren't any more of these majestic creatures in the wilds of North America today, they have a fascinating history on the continent.
Many natural historians believe that camels actually originated in North America. According to Interesting Engineering, it is currently believed that camels roamed North America an eye-watering 40 million to 50 million years ago. That means that camels were around for as much as 48 million years before the first human ever existed (per History).
Those same scientists have estimated that it wasn't until 3 million years ago that camels made their way across the Bering Strait via the land bridge that once connected Alaska to Russia. It was this migration that brought camels to Asia and Northern Africa, the two places perhaps most associated with the majestic animals today.
What is even more extraordinary is that recent discoveries have suggested that camels weren't just relegated to one area of North America — they spread all over vastly different terrains. For example, construction workers building a freeway in San Diego unearthed camel fossils in 2020, per The San Diego Union-Tribune. The fossils have since been dated to be around 15 million years old and suggest that the animals once happily lived in the area now claimed by the popular California city.
Camel fossils have also been found in what is almost the total opposite terrain from San Diego. In 2006, archaeologists found a camel skeleton on Canada's Ellesmere Island, located in the northernmost part of Canada and neighboring Greenland. As part of the arctic archipelago ring, the geography of Ellesmere Island can be described as snowy and mountainous with a jagged coastline. Many refer to the terrain on the island as the "horizontal Himalayas," according to The New World Encyclopedia. That said, the fossils showed that the camel was a whopping nine feet tall, so it remains unknown exactly how this species had adapted to survive in the vastly different land type.
Sadly, exact details surrounding the specific biology of the North American camel remain somewhat a mystery, as the animals died out around 11,000 years ago. This corresponds to when humans first made their way to the Americas, suggesting that perhaps they were hunted into extinction, not unlike the fate that almost befell the American bison in the late 19th century. Experts have estimated that around one-eighth of some early Native American diets consisted of camel meat, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
That said, some scientists have suggested that the mammals died out less because of human overkill, but because of geological changes that occurred when the planet adjusted from a glacial climate to an interglacial one, per The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whatever the reason, the camel was not able to survive.
However, that doesn't mean that remnants of the camel and its history haven't made their mark on the Americas. According to National Geographic, llamas, alpacas, guanacos, and vicuñas of South America were all descended from the camel. Moreover, camels were to have a small resurgence in North America later in history — but for a different reason entirely.
It is surprising. :^) It’s amusing that the two-humped “Bactrian” camel is the camel, while the single-humped is actually called a dromedary.
Not by me, but you know how people can get. :^)
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The animals were not “hunted to extinction”; they and every other mega fauna worldwide died out at the same time due to a 100 year long comet fragment bombardment with burned off 4% of the Earth’s vegetation.
The bombardment was principally centered on the Laurentide Ice Sheet which left no craters in the ground below the 2 mile think ice sheet.
The only remnants are in the Carolinas and Nebraska depressions from the falling ice chunks.