PERTH: The discovery of a fully intact camel skeleton in a cellar in Tulln, Austria, in 2006 left archaeologists scratching the heads at how the desert animal ended up on the banks of the Danube. Almost a decade later, a team of researchers in Austria report that they think they have now pieced the puzzle together, they reported last week in a PLOS ONE study.
The story goes back to the two months that led up to the epic 1683 Battle of Vienna, a turning point in the 300-year conflict between the Muslim Ottoman and Catholic Austrian empires. (Researchers dated the camel using the other artifacts buried with it – specifically, coins and a bottle of medicine.) Before the hundreds of thousands Turkish soldiers sieged the city, they likely interacted with the locals on somewhat friendlier terms. Or, at least, the Turks impressed the people of Tulln with their four-legged rides.
The camel’s appearance in Tulln “might be linked to an exchange of local people with the troops, or the Ottoman army simply left it behind,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Apparently, the citizens took it inside the town, where they probably kept it and displayed it as an ‘exotic animal.’”
