Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that all the wild horses of Europe and
Asia were on their way to extinction well before some of the survivors were
domesticated. We will see in Chapter 8 that humans have intensively hunted
wild horses for hundreds of thousands of years. The remains of large num-
bers of wild horses from 400,000 years ago have been found at one small site
in Germany. They were butchered by close relatives of ours, the pre-Nean-
derthals. As a result of such intensive hunting, there were probably only a
few populations of wild horses left by the time some of them were fi nally
domesticated. And the wild remainder, made up of animals that were less
easily tamed, were hunted down across the open steppes where they had no
refuge. The last of them were eaten long before naturalists arrived on the
scene.
The camels that also play a central role in Mongolian life have undergone
a similar saga of domestication accompanied by the extinction of their wild
progenitors. The two-humped Bactrian camel is a tough animal found today
throughout the cold deserts of central Asia and as far west as Kazakhstan.
It seems to have been even more widespread in the past, extending its range
all the way to the Indus valley, but in many areas it has been supplanted by
the one-humped dromedary. Its closest wild relatives now consist of a few
thousand wild two-humped camels roaming the Mongolian-Chinese bor-
der regions. The wild camels have smaller humps and longer, thinner legs
than the domestic variety.
The two-humped Bactrian camels carried silks, spices, gold, and jewels
along the Central Asian Silk Road, along with the traders who dealt in them.
As a matter of personal taste, I much prefer riding two-humped camels.
Nestling comfortably between their humps is like riding a La-Z-Boy recliner
with legs (and diarrhea). It is an entirely dif erent experience from balancing
on the top of a dromedary's single hump as it snarls, spits, and lurches across
the desert through a series of increasingly uncomfortable forward speeds.
A group of Chinese investigators from Beijing, Shanghai, and Inner Mon-
golia have now shown that, like the horse, the Bactrian camel was most likely
to have been domesticated in the region of Mongolia and western China
that lay at the heartland of the later Mongol empire. They also showed that
