Sharjah's 3,000-year-old clue to the first domesticated camels

SHARJAH // Archaeologists are unearthing answers to one of the Arab region’s biggest historical mysteries – the origin of the domesticated dromedary.

According to 3,000-year-old evidence discovered at two excavation sites in Sharjah, people in what is now the UAE were probably the first to domesticate the wild camel.

A team from Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia has been digging at the sites in Tell Abraq and Muweilah along the border with Umm Al Qaiwain since early December.

The excavations have revealed almost 10 times as many bones of domesticated dromedaries as at any other single site in the Middle East.

The sites have been known to archaeologists since the 1970s, when they were first excavated by teams from Australia and Denmark.

Among them was a young archaeology doctoral student, Peter Magee, who came to the region because he was fascinated by the Middle East’s history.

Now he has returned to explore the sites again, “because there were unanswered questions here that I wanted to resolve”.

According to Mr Magee, the history of the domesticated dromedary is key to understanding the expansion of human settlements at that time, around 1000BC, when the camel was vital to a flourishing local population as a prime source of meat and milk...

The National