 I will be talking about research I did for my master thesis, yeah, about camels. And also camels are, as you all know, not indigenous to Europe, there's a surprising large amount of camel finds from the Roman Empire in central Europe and Iberia. They start from the 1st century AD to the 4th century AD, and as I use toothed animal for my study, it is important to know that there are 14 sites with teeth, including basal, which isn't indicated on this map because the tooth was only found last year. There are both species present, so we have dromedaries, we have bactrian camels, and we have also some indication of a hybrid camel from Turkey. But in most of the cases the species is unknown because different species identification on camels is very difficult when you only have osteological methods. Now what were these camels used for? There has been a little bit of research and of course they were used as beasts of burden in both trade and military contexts. They could also have been used in agriculture as we have depictions of camels that were harnessed to plows, for example from a Roman tombstone from Girsá, from Libya. We also have written evidence that they played a role in the Ludi, the Roman games, they were used in camel fights and camel races, and of course also camel products were used, their hair was used to create textiles, and also we have some written evidence that their meat and their milk was consumed occasionally. Now the overall goals of the study were very generally to investigate camel husbandry in the Roman Empire, and to do this we wanted to reconstruct their life history and their mobility pattern from a couple of camels that were found at these Roman sites in central Europe, and with our study also test how we can use carbon and oxygen to get an idea about mobility of these animals. As we have heard, when we are using toothed animal we get information about the early years of the camel's life. This is a chart that shows a rough estimation which time periods the different teeth represent. I didn't sample deciduous teeth but only permanent teeth, and these are the estimations based on tooth eruption times that we came up with, and then we use the variation in the water to infer differences in the climate, and as camels obtain most of the water from the plants they eat, I have here a picture of the global mean delta oxygen 18 values of leaf water, and we can already see that there is a decent amount of variation even on this global scale with much higher values in northern Africa than in central Asia, and of course the lowest values in central Europe. And these are the distributions of the two camel species that are quite distinct, so we probably can also not only see where the camels come from but maybe also get an indication about what camel species this could be. Okay, so the material I used comes from this area indicated in the right corner from central Europe. We had four individuals from four sites, the first of which is Innsport-Milton settlement from the second to third century AD, and we had the third molar and the fourth premolar. Then we have a dromedary from Luxembourg, from Maméa de Troche, from the third century AD. Here we had all three molars present from the mandible, and another camel dromedary from the first half of the fourth century AD from Tongeren in nowadays Belgium, and the fourth one is from the second half of the third century AD. Yeah, species couldn't be identified there either, and it's from here in Germany. All four of them were adult individuals, no cat marks were present on the bone, and all in all I took 73 samples along the tooth crowns. The reference material I used to get a sense of different kinds of habitats are indicated on this map, and they span a large area. The sites indicated in bold letters are sites where I analyzed reference material from. The other ones I used published later in the literature. Now the research questions I wanted to address with the study was, first of all, if I can find out roughly the area where the camels originated from, and to see if the camels were all imported to Europe or if they were even bred there, because this was suggested in the literature based on some finds of juvenile camel bones in Tanaïs on the Black Sea shore. Yeah, and also I wanted to see if all the individuals show a similar mobility pattern or if they all behave completely differently, and in hindsight also check if I can use my data as an additional proxy for species identification. Yeah, I took introduced serial samples along the tooth crown axis and to obtain a continuous record, and then used the data to see any shifts in the habitat. Now this is the reference data, the mean with plus minus one sigma. On the x-axis we have the carbon-13, and on the y-axis we have the oxygen-18, and we see central Europe clearly has the lowest oxygen and carbon values, with an increase towards north African Arabia, which has the highest values, which is the driest and most warm habitat. Now where do our camels now come from? These are the M1s from three of the camels. Yeah, Mamé Bertrand shows a clear association to like north African habitats. In this case it aligns with Chad. Then we have Tria, which has lower values and probably this doesn't originate from north Africa, but more like near to Middle Eastern area, and then Tongaren is the one, the camel that was most close to Europe, but probably not originated from central Europe, but more like outside of Europe, probably the Mediterranean area. But as you can see we have kind of a gap of the reference material there, so we can't really say with confidence where this camel came from. Now I want to talk a bit about the similar multi-migration or mobility pattern of the camel from Mamé Bertrand and Tria. They both show a continuous approximation throughout the lifetime from very warm and dry habitats towards central European values with Mamé Bertrand's originating from north Africa and yeah the journey of the camel from Tria probably starts in the near or middle east. Interestingly we can link both of them with a specific military unit, the Ligio 8 Augusta. This unit was present and active in the Middle East in the third century AD and we have some written evidence, we have some inscriptions from both Tria and Mamé that proves that this military unit was also present at these two sites where the camels were found in the third century AD, so probably they were picked up by this military unit and then took back to central Europe sometime after they were five years old. To complete the picture I also added the other two camels. The things are a bit more complicated here, we don't really see any shifts in diet between C3 and C4 plants for the camel from Tonga then but we see quite a large variation of the oxygen values which could mean that it moved from a warmer habitat towards a more temperate one between the ages of four to five years. The camel from Innsbruck Milton, it doesn't show a large variation of either the oxygen or the carbon values. They are very stable and we also don't see any sign of seasonal variation of the oxygen values which could indicate that it moved in a way that avoided this high, just avoided seasonal temperature variation. So to conclude we didn't find any real evidence that camels were bred at any of these four sites or in central Europe. They originated from different sites so there also was in one place where all the camels originated from and were brought to Europe. We could find a similar mobility pattern of the camels from Maméa Bertrand and Trier and link them to a military unit and we also saw that we can probably use it as an additional proxy for species identification as now we can see that the individual from Trier most likely is a dromedary as it's from the near to middle east. And yeah, we have quite a decent amount of variation and can get quite a lot of information about right life history and mobility of these individuals. Whoops, I would like to thank my collaborators and also the funding body, the Sankenberg Institute and thank you for your attention.