Camel-human Hybrids?
Mammalian Hybrids
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A diligent scholar is like a bee who takes honey from many different flowers and stores it in his hive.
—John Amos Comenius
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Dromedary
Camelus dromedarius
This page contains no scientific evidence of the occurrence of hybridization between humans and camels. The reports recorded here may be entirely fanciful.
A Renaissance engraving depicting a camel-human hybrid is reproduced below. The image is taken from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri’s Opera nel a quale vie molti Mostri de tute le parti del mondo antichi et moderni... (Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world), published in Italy in 1585. Given the humps shown in the picture and the Egyptian locale specified in its caption, Cavalieri must have intended to imply that a dromedary was the camel parent. But he cites no sources, so this picture amounts to little more than myth. The only thing making it at all plausible that such a cross might occur is the fact that a camel is a domestic ungulate. There are several different types of crosses between humans and such animals for which many reports are on record, including pig × human, cow × human, sheep × human, goat × human, water buffalo × human, and horse × human.
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In English, the caption reads, “In the mountains of Egypt there are deformed creatures such as the one you see here, with arms and feet like those of a human, but the body of a camel. They carry their children on their backs and reside in the forest. They live thirty years, producing one child at a time, and run with great speed. The males are great fishermen and very ferocious to those they meet. And yet, they always do nuns great honor, lifting them up and carrying them upon their shoulders.”
Another picture of a camel-human hybrid, published in 1690 in a German pamphlet, appears below.
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In English, the caption beginss, “A true depiction of a maneater that was caught in Ireland in the [county of] Fermanagh and brought to Dublin…”
By the same author: Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World, Oxford University Press (2006).