Radiocarbon dating has pinpointed the time when camels arrived in the Middle East, and those findings appear to directly contradict the Bible.
The Old Testament states camels were regular pack animals in the stories of Jacob, Joseph and Abraham. Scholars generally date those events to between 1500 and 2000 BC. New experiments, however, show camels were likely not domesticated in the area until 900 BC. The dating was conducted on the oldest known camel bones in the Arabian Peninsula. These were found at the remains of a copper-smelting site called the Arava Valley, between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea. In addition to the radiocarbon dating, researchers noticed camel bones also suddenly became prominent near ruins of human settlements about that time. Although scattered camel bones were found around earlier human-made artifacts, researchers believe these were from wild animals.
The copper camp was explored by Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, researchers from Tel Aviv University, during a dig in 2009. He led a second expedition to the site in 2013, in order to pinpoint the time when camels first appeared in southern Levant, a region which includes the area of ancient and modern-day Israel.
The domestication of the camel had a significant effect on the people of the land. Since these animals could travel much further than mules and donkeys, longer trade routes opened up, allowing the free flow of goods, money and ideas. With the adoption of camels as a domestic animal, primitive copper smelting operations became more sophisticated, and began using centralized labor. By the 7th century BC, the Incense Road stretched from Africa, and passed through Israel on its way to India.
"The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development. By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries," Ben-Yosef said.
Some earlier research suggested the animals were not domesticated until around 1200 BC, well after they were said to be present in the Bible. But, this new discovery would place the change to decades after the Kingdom of David. It would also suggest the stories mentioning pack camels in the Age of of the Patriarchs were written centuries after the events they describe.
Ben-Yosef and his colleagues believe the bones of the oldest camels to leave the Arabian Peninsula may be found in the Aravah Valley. Finding those remains could lend further evidence that some biblical tales of domesticated camels were too early to be true.
