Hump stump solved: Camels arrived in region much later than biblical reference
The arrival of the camel opened up new economic possibilities. Photo by Erez Ben-Yosef
Archaeologists who carried out digs in the Arava and in Jordan theorize that the camel first appeared in this country 300 years later than previously thought, long after the kingdoms of David and Solomon.
By Nir Hasson | Jan. 17, 2014 | 8:00 AM
n Genesis 32, a few verses after Jacob’s dramatic meeting with the angels is described, we learn that he sent gifts to his brother Esau. Along with “two hundred she-goats and twenty he-goats,” there are “thirty milch camels and their colts.” The mention of camels in Genesis – here and in the Abraham and Joseph sagas – is an anachronism well known to the science of archaeology. It is, by the same token, one of the decisive proofs that the Bible was written hundreds of years after the events it narrates. All the archaeological evidence suggests that, even if there were historical characters named Jacob and Esau, they were not familiar with the humped animal, or at least not as a pack animal. The reason is that in the period of the patriarchs, there were no domesticated camels in the Land of Israel or the surrounding region.
A study based on archaeological excavations in Israel’s Timna Valley, and in Wadi Finan in Jordan, reinforces the theory that the camel was not adopted in this country until about 930 BCE – 300 years later than previously thought.
The study, which was conducted by Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen and Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef, suggests that the oldest camel bones found in Israel are those from the copper mines in Timna, which lies north of today’s Eilat. An examination of the layers in which the bones were found, and no less important, of the layers in which no bones were found, shows that the camel was first introduced into the southern Levant in the last third of the 10th century BCE. – many hundreds of years after the story of the patriarchs would have taken place, and decades after the Kingdom of David, in terms of the biblical timetable, around 1930 BCE. Radiocarbon dating supports this.
There is also a good chance, the researchers think, that among these bones are the remains of the first camel that served man outside the Arabian Peninsula, where the dromedary was domesticated a few centuries earlier.
Only a few camel bones had been found in Israel from prior to this period, and they almost certainly belonged to wild camels that were hunted and eaten, rather than pack animals. The introduction of camels to the Timna area, beyond Arabia, accompanied an extensive reform of the copper production processes at the site. This development was probably linked to the military campaign waged by Pharaoh Shoshenq I in the area at this time, and the subordination of the mines to Egyptian control. The camels did not arrive from Egypt; however, the animal was adopted there in an even later era.
Sapir-Hen is an archaeozoologist, someone who studies the place of animals in ancient human culture. In regard to the Negev camels, she can distinguish not only the animals’ sex and age but also whether they were domesticated or wild. For example, if a camel carried heavy loads, it would have left signs in the leg bones that would be visible even 3,000 years later. The demographic distribution of the bones, too, shows that these were not camels that were hunted, as there are many more males than females and many more adults than young camels. That is consistent with camel convoys, where male camels were preferred due to their strength.
Until the appearance of the camel in the Arava, the local human population made do with the more veteran pack animals – donkeys and mules. The camel opened up new economic possibilities. “It is clear to us that without the camel there are things that couldn’t have worked, such as the perfume trade with Arabia,” says Ben-Yosef, who has headed a Tel Aviv University archaeological dig at Timna for the past several years.
“It’s unlikely that mules could have traversed the distance from one desert oasis to the next,” he adds. “The camel accelerated the development of these trade routes, and we see, in fact, that these routes emerge in the ninth century BCE, after the appearance of the camel.” The perfume trade with the East, which was made possible thanks to the camel, became an important element in the local economy and continued successively for more than 1,500 years.
Tel Aviv University archaeologists pinpoint the date when domesticated camels arrived in Israel
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 3-Feb-2014
Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob. But archaeologists have shown that camels were not domesticated in the Land of Israel until centuries after the Age of the Patriarchs (2000-1500 BCE). In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes.
Now Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the moment when domesticated camels arrived in the southern Levant, pushing the estimate from the 12th to the 9th century BCE. The findings, published recently in the journal Tel Aviv, further emphasize the disagreements between Biblical texts and verifiable history, and define a turning point in Israel's engagement with the rest of the world.
"The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development," said Dr. Ben-Yosef. "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."
Copper mining and camel riding
Archaeologists have established that camels were probably domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In the southern Levant, where Israel is located, the oldest known domesticated camel bones are from the Aravah Valley, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and was an ancient center of copper production. At a 2009 dig, Dr. Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found to the 11th to 9th century BCE. In 2013, he led another dig in the area.
To determine exactly when domesticated camels appeared in the southern Levant, Dr. Sapir-Hen and Dr. Ben-Yosef used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to analyze the findings of these digs as well as several others done in the valley. In all the digs, they found that camel bones were unearthed almost exclusively in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BCE or later – centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible. The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think were in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period or even earlier. Notably, all the sites active in the 9th century in the Arava Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.
The appearance of domesticated camels in the Aravah Valley appears to coincide with dramatic changes in the local copper mining operation. Many of the mines and smelting sites were shut down; those that remained active began using more centralized labor and sophisticated technology, according to the archaeological evidence. The researchers say the ancient Egyptians may have imposed these changes – and brought in domesticated camels – after conquering the area in a military campaign mentioned in both biblical and Egyptian sources.
Humping it to India
The origin of the domesticated camel is probably the Arabian Peninsula, which borders the Aravah Valley and would have been a logical entry point for domesticated camels into the southern Levant. In fact, Dr. Ben-Yosef and Dr. Sapir-Hen say the first domesticated camels ever to leave the Arabian Peninsula may now be buried in the Aravah Valley.
The arrival of domesticated camels promoted trade between Israel and exotic locations unreachable before, according to the researchers; the camels can travel over much longer distances than the donkeys and mules that preceded them. By the seventh century BCE, trade routes like the Incense Road stretched all the way from Africa through Israel to India. Camels opened Israel up to the world beyond the vast deserts, researchers say, profoundly altering its economic and social history.
Contact: George Hunka ghunka@aftau.org 212-742-9070 American Friends of Tel Aviv University
American Friends of Tel Aviv University supports Israel's leading, most comprehensive and most sought-after center of higher learning, Tel Aviv University (TAU). Rooted in a pan-disciplinary approach to education, TAU is internationally recognized for the scope and groundbreaking nature of its research and scholarship — attracting world-class faculty and consistently producing cutting-edge work with profound implications for the future. TAU is independently ranked 116th among the world's top universities and #1 in Israel. It joins a handful of elite international universities that rank among the best producers of successful startups.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4ehMFC0Fr0 [this one about 9 minutes shorter, with nothing taken out of the initial c. 13-minute countdown, so obviously edited ("This will be a HD version of the Google Hangout Broadcast featuring nationally certified ASL interpreters."); comments disabled]
This is the Errol Morris documentary [1991 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time_(film) {add the close parenthesis at the end to the url when opened to get the correct Wiki page})] about Stephen Hawking, named after Stephen's book, A Brief History of Time. It's a brilliant documentary, scored by Philip Glass, that was never released on DVD in the U.S. and is not otherwise available through Netflix streaming, Blockbuster online, Hulu, iTunes, etc. (There's a Dutch DVD, which may or may not be licensed, but that's all I know of.)
Easy to understand evidence for a common ape-like human/chimp ancestor. One of thousands of collaborating pieces of evidence, but this one is very conceptual. Whip it out anytime a creationist starts preaching.
Ken Miller's talk on Intelligent Design at Case Western University. Ken Miller basically rips Intelligent Design apart in a 2 hour long exposé of the claims of intelligent design and the tactics that creationists employ to get it shoehorned into the American school system.
The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God.
The documentary was first broadcast in January 2006, in the form of two 45-minute episodes (excluding advertisement breaks), on Channel 4 in the UK.
Dawkins has said that the title The Root of All Evil? was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy. The sole concession from the producers on the title was the addition of the question mark. Dawkins has stated that the notion of anything being the root of all evil is ridiculous. Dawkins' book The God Delusion, released in September 2006, goes on to examine the topics raised in the documentary in greater detail. The documentary was rebroadcast on the More4 channel on the 25th August 2010 under the title of The God Delusion.
I downloaded this video from the now defunct Google Video and uploaded here so it's archived and isn't lost after Google Video deletes all it's content. Original description below:
This is a presentation [from November, 2006] on science, religion, and how poorly-designed humans, the Earth, and the universe really are. The presenter, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is the new host of the PBS-TV program "NOVA scienceNOW", director of the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center For Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Have you ever seen Bill O'Reilly so scared to give an educated guest time to speak?
Watch as he barely gives the space or time to let Dawkins really speak. Watch as he makes a joke when there's a question he can't answer. Uncomfortable fear from Bill.
"In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form."
which is just kinda like it is, eh .. lol .. Bachmann, sputters, 'SEE! Thats why we shouldn't listen to scientists!' .. she would have had a ball back when they believed a God controlled tides .. fair enough, too .. science was relatively young .. there is a Bacchman feast here ..
she would have treated Ptolemy as she treats Hawking today .. dismally .. truly Bachmann is a woman after her time ..
Ken Miller's short human chromosome 2 video was a good one, lol, sounds he left the Intelligent Design people up in the air .. here is the little devil in drier form .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)
..and Bill O'Reilly sticking to Jesus as God until science has ALL the answers .. lol ..
then came Aussis, i reckon .. lol .. Copeland, ?, Hinn ..
John Oliver talks to Stephen Hawking in the first installment of Last Week Tonight's new "People Who Think Good" series. They cover such topics as parallel universes, artificial intelligence, and Charlize Theron.
It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for.
By Christie Aschwanden
Graphics by Ritchie King
If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.
Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were rubber-stamping their own work, circumventing peer review at five high-profile publishers.
Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given that the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”
Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.
Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.
If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result. I could pontificate about all the reasons why science is arduous, but instead I’m going to let you experience one of them for yourself. Welcome to the wild world of p-hacking.
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