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Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

"The 'Mystery' of the Bible's Phantom Camels"

There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.

If you're going to tell us that the Bible is not composed of historically accurate accounts by contemporary writers, that's really nothing new.

I wonder about the camel thing, though. Did the authors/editors of the texts consider camels ubiquitous? Did they know that camels were very special and wanted to mention it? Was it a mistranslation?

Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history of portraying people from the past in historically inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take for granted.

One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.

Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's anachronistic, not the camels themselves.

According to everything I can google, camels are definitely domesticated, and the vast majority of them are today. According to wikipedia, there’s technically only 1400 “wild” camels or so, from the wild Bactrian group

Some other neat facts I just learned:

1. Apparently domestication can be defined as simply “12 generations of selective breeding”. What exactly is being selected is left open.

2. Feral is defined as first domesticated, then released. The only truly wild population of camels is apparently the wild Bactrian camels, in the gobi desert

3. Apparently camels started in the NA, traveled to Asia, got wiped out in NA (presumably by humans), got tamed in Asia, and then brought back to NA.

4. Apparently this also true of horses.

I remember seeing a late medieval painting of a saint and he's wearing spectacles.

And that solution comes in many, many shades of gray. Picking the right shade is less obvious.

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