Camels attract myths the way a parked car attracts dust. Some are jokes that got repeated until people forgot they were jokes. Others are half-truths that got simplified once too often. Here are the ones we hear most, and what is actually going on.
Myth: camels were discovered by scientists in the twentieth century
This one started as a gag and escaped into the wild. Camels have been working alongside people for thousands of years. Genetic work published in 2016 traced the domestication of the dromedary, the one-humped camel, to the southeastern Arabian Peninsula roughly 3,000 years ago. The two-humped Bactrian was domesticated earlier, around 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, somewhere in Central Asia. Both show up in ancient art, trade records and scripture. Nobody needed to find them.
Myth: camels spit at anyone who walks by
Camels can spray you, but they rarely do it without a reason. A camel that is handled every day and treated calmly is, as a rule, a cooperative animal. The ones that let fly are usually frightened, crowded, or being pushed to do something they do not want to do. It works more as a warning than an attack.
What comes out is not really spit, either. Camels chew cud. They have a three-chambered stomach and bring partly digested food back up to chew it again. An angry camel brings some of that up, mixes it with saliva and flings it off its loose lips. The smell is the point. If the camel has been grazing, the mess is often green.
Myth: the hump is full of water
The hump is fat, as much as 80 pounds of it on a well-fed dromedary. It is an energy reserve that lets a camel go a long time without eating, and keeping the fat in one lump on top helps the rest of the body shed heat. Camels survive without drinking because of a long list of water-saving tricks, not because of a tank on their back. We go into the physiology in our explainer on what the hump really does.
Myth: a leaning hump means a sick camel
A hump that has flopped to one side looks alarming, but it is not a disease in itself. Humps lean when the fat inside them gets used up and the tissue loses its shape. That happens after a stretch of poor feeding, illness, heavy work or stress. Breeding males are known for it, because during the rut they can nearly stop eating. Very old or overweight camels can also develop saggy humps.
On Bactrian camels, with two humps to keep upright, it is common enough that owners hardly comment on it. Once the animal is back in good condition, the humps generally firm up and stand again. Some breeders in the United States, where Bactrians are fairly rare and partly valued on looks, have tried braces and harnesses to straighten them. Results are mixed. Better feeding does most of the work.
Myth: camels are bad-tempered by nature
Camels have a reputation for groaning, bellowing and generally complaining, and they do all of those things. Like horses, though, individual temperament varies a lot, and a camel’s behavior has a great deal to do with how it was raised and handled. Racing camels, pack camels and dairy camels across the Middle East, Africa and Asia are handled daily by people who would not put up with a dangerous animal.
The real camel is more interesting than any of the myths: an animal that has carried trade, armies and families across deserts for three thousand years and is still doing it. For the basics of telling the two species apart, see our guide to one-hump and two-hump camels.
Sources: Almathen et al., “Ancient and modern DNA reveal dynamics of domestication and cross-continental dispersal of the dromedary,” PNAS (2016); Camel, Wikipedia; Camel, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
