Evolution
The extinct Protylopus, which occurred in the upper Eocene in North America, is both the oldest smallest camel known. In the transitional period from Pliocene to Pleistocene, the Camelus species migrated across the Bering Strait and dispersed widely to Asia, eastern Europe and Africa. By the Pleistocene, ancestors of the dromedary came to be known from the Middle East and North Africa.
The ancient fossils of C. sivalensis and C. antiquus have been traced in the Shiwalik Hills in India. Fossils of subgenus Paracamelus were found in western Siberia, China, near the Sea of Azov and the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the Pliocene, Camelus species ranged much far south in Africa, and in northern Africa remains of C. thomasi have been found. It is possible the dromedary had origins in Arabia and is therefore sometimes referred to as the Arabian camel. A jawbone of a dromedary, whose radiocarbon date was 8200 BP and calibrated 7100-7200 BC, was found on the southern coast of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia.
Read more about this topic: Dromedary
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)