Ancient engravings etched onto a mammoth tusk discovered in Siberia reveal the oldest known images of camels in Asia.
Images of two-humped camels have been found etched onto a 1.5-metre mammoth tusk discovered in the lower Tom river in western Siberia. The tusk is about 13,000 years old and also has an etching of what researchers call an anthropomorphic image, which may portray a human wearing a camel disguise.
Much has been found in Siberia dated from around the following tens of thousands of years, including some of the earliest known drawings of an animal that still lives today.
The etchings, of fighting camels, were found carved on 13,000-year-old mammoth tusks.
The five-foot-long tusks also included etchings of an anthropomorphic image that, archaeologists say, resembles a human wearing a camel disguise.
The team, from the Khakassian Research Institute for Language, Literature and History in Russia, examined the artefact after finding it in the lower Tom River in western Siberia.
Writing in a paper published in the science journal Archaeological Research in Asia, study author Dr Yury Esin said the etching of the human may have served demonstrative purposes to show people how to hunt camels without alerting them.
Other drawings included depictions of camels locked in vicious fights, which could represent the beginning of the mating season and a vital date in the life cycle of the ancient communities.
The camels shown on the tusks match up with images of camels painted in caves from around the same time, the oldest of which is found in Kapova cave in the Ural mountains and dates to 19,000 years ago.
The only difference is the fact that the camels are fighting neck to neck, while another pair of the animals have arrows and wounds clearly marked on them.
“The comparative analysis of the stylistic features of the camel figures shows that they correspond to the age of the tusk itself, making them, at present, the oldest camel images in Asia,” the authors wrote in 2020.
“The discovery of the engravings in this region is consistent with the theory of mobile population groups moving to western Siberia in the Late Upper Paleolithic.”
While it is unclear what the etchings were used for, the researchers say they signify how important camel fights and hunting were to the people who called the place home.
Dr Esin noted that while the hunting was likely to have been seasonal, the fights probably happened at the start of the mating season.
The fights, he speculated, could have marked a significant point in the cycle of humans surviving and living on the lands around the animals.
While few camel bones have been found in the Tom River, those that have been recovered date from between 30,000 and 55,000 years ago.
Some date to the time from the tusk, around 13,000 years ago, but they were found much further away, hundreds of miles downriver.
Other etchings of camels, like that pictured, have been found in the Ural Mountains area of Siberia (Image: Yury Esin)
According to Dr Esin, this means that the community were likely nomadic.
The tusk itself was first discovered in 1988 during construction works but had remained unstudied until Dr Esin and his team began their investigations.