History of camel: dominance and collapse

If the camel's close relationship to man was foreshadowed by the two species' concurrent, countercurrent, then the camel's fate during and after the last Ice Age was a sure signal of things to come.

By the middle Pleistocene, Camellus included at least seven different species spread across southern Europe, North and East Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia. Although each differed in morphology and environment, osteological and ecological clues tell us that, by and large, they lived much as camels do today. Their adaptations to aridity gave them access to untapped resources and protected them from most predators. But periodic ice ages drove declines in the marginal areas the camels enjoyed most, pushing them into closer contact and competition with other herd animals. Humans, always ready to eat anything big and easily hunted, didn't help.

By the beginning of the Holocene (12,000ya) most camel species were extinct, and the others had been driven into small refuges. In southern Arabia, the dromedary survived only in the hilly fringes of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter. The Bactrian, like Lama, took refuge in the mountains of Central Asia. And some scholars hold that a third species remained in the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria until the introduction of the domestic camel. In any case, the precipitous climate and human-fueled decline of Camelllus is an apt analogy for the problems the animals face today.

Source: Wilson RT. 1984. The Camel. Essex: Longman Group.