Potential impact of Holocene climate changes on camel breeding practices of Neolithic pastoralists in the Central Asian drylands: A preliminary assessment

Abstract

Archaeological findings from the Neolithic open-air location Ayakagytma ‘The Site’, situated in the south-eastern part of the Kyzyl-kum Desert in Uzbekistan, can potentially shed new light on the camel domestication process in the Central Asian drylands and help to connect it to regional changes of paleoclimate. Detailed analyses of composition and 13C isotopic ratios of fatty acids performed on potsherds from an archaeological horizon of a Keltaminar culture dated at 3000–4000 cal BC combined with analogical analyses of modern camel and horse milk samples from Uzbekistan indicated a plausible possibility that camels were kept and milked by stockbreeders of Ayakagytma during this time period. The observed herding practices based almost exclusively on camel husbandry, as opposed to earlier more balanced herds of cattle, horses and camels, were probably an adaptation to climate transition from relatively humid to relatively dry, and the following changes in vegetation. Such climatic shift did not correspond with the general trend of Holocene moisture changes over the Westerlies-dominated Central Asia. However, it was in accordance with wet-to-dry climate transitions recorded in sediments of several lakes in the same region at around 4000 cal BP. The observed changes in Neolithic stockbreeding practices, as other inconsistencies in Holocene moisture evolution over a massive area of arid Central Asia, may have resulted from local manifestations of globally-forced climate changes and/or from local hydrographic alterations unrelated to paleoclimate.