CHAPTER NINE

CAMELUS BACTRIANUS, THE BACTRIAN CAMEL

9.1 The Living Animal

9.1.1 Zoology Together with the dromedary and the South American llamas, the Bactrian camel (fi g. 157) belongs to an order of its own: that of the tylopods, or camels in the broad sense. Camels have an exceptionally great water effi ciency and extreme heat tolerance. The humps of the Bactrian camel and the dromedary are not water reservoirs but fat reserves, which almost disappear in times of starvation. The accu- mulation of the body fat in one single area facilitates dissipation of heat. Camels are among the most derived mammal species in terms of adaptation to the environment. Their physiology makes it possible to withstand extreme heat and extreme aridity. Camels have long-curved necks, a deep-narrow chest, long thin legs, a relatively small head, large eyes with long eye lashes, slit-like nostrils, a split upper lip, massive and pointed canine teeth, a much less developed hindquarter and a long, tufted tail. They are even-toed with a soft pad below their almost square feet and a web between the two toes. The black skin forms horny pads at the sternum, elbows, carpals, tarsals and stifl es. The teeth are very different from those of ruminants—bovids and deer—. The central incisors are missing in the upper jaw, just as in ruminants, but the lateral incisor is present, being sharp and pointed. An upper canine is also present as in deer; immediately behind it is another canine-like tooth, which is in reality a transformed premolar. Thus it looks as if there are three canines at either side of the upper jaw. The Bactrian camel is the two-humped species and lives in cold, alpine regions, in the arid and semi-arid deserts. It is a heavy and large animal with a shoulder height of 1.85 m and a stocky built. Wild Bactrian camels,1 nowadays restricted to the Gobi desert of Mongolia,

1 Generally referred to as Camelus ferus. bactrian camel 141 are a little larger than the domestic Bactrian camels and have larger humps. To stand very low temperatures, Bactrian camels develop a long, woolly pelage, which becomes shaggy in the winter. In the summer, when temperatures can be high, they shed part of this coat. Bactrian camels and dromedaries (fi g. 158) can interbreed and produce fertile female offspring; male offspring is usually sterile.

9.1.2 Role of Bactrian Camels in Society Hunting wild camels is not known to have had any importance in histori- cal times in South Asia, and it is not likely that it ever had, regarding the unlikely distribution of wild camels in India. As domestic animal, the Bactrian camel is mainly used as pack animal, for its extremely dry dung which is ideal as fuel for fi res and less so for its milk, meat, and wool. Bactrian camels have been used and bred for several thousands of years. The earliest evidence comes from central Iran, where camel dung has been dated to c. 2,600 B.C.E.2 Remains of wild and domestic camels are hard to tell apart because there has been little selective breeding. This makes it extremely diffi cult to trace the process of domestication. Only artistic representations, camel dung and juvenile bones provide some evidence. At Pirak in Pakistan, small two-humped camel fi gurines were found in deposits dated c. 1,700–750 B.C.E.,3 but the recovered bones seem not to have been studied in detail.4 In the Indus Valley, camel bones—including a complete skeleton of a juvenile—were found at Mohenjo-daro5 and Harappa.6 They were initially attributed to the dromedary but probably belonged to the two-humped variety, as is shown by the fi gurines of Pirak and the remains found in deposits

2 B. Compagnoni and M. Tosi, “The Camel: Its Distribution and State of Domes- tication in the Middle East during the Third Millenium B.C. in Light of Finds from Shahr-i Sokhta,” in Approaches to Faunal Analysis in the Middle East, ed. R. Meadow and M. Zeder, Peabody Museum Bulletin 2 (1978), 91–103. 3 J.-F. Jarrige, “Étude generale,” in Fouilles de Pirak, vol. 1, ed. J.-F. Jarrige, J. Enault and M. Santoni (Paris: Diffusion De Boccard, 1979), 3–102. 4 R. Meadow, “A Preliminary Note on the Faunal Remains from Pirak,” in Fouilles de Pirak, op. cit., vol. 1, 334. 5 R. Sewell, “Zoological Remains,” in Mohenjodaro and the Indus civilization, ed. J. Marshall (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931); Meadow, op. cit. (1986), 43–64. 6 B. Prashad, Animal Remains from Harappa, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India (1936) 51.