The domestic Bactrian camels were treated as one of the principal means of locomotion between the eastern and western cultures in history. However, whether they originated from East Asia or Central Asia remains elusive. To address this question, we performed whole-genome sequencing of 128 camels across Asia. The extant wild and domestic Bactrian camels showed remarkable genetic divergence since they were split from dromedaries. The wild Bactrian camels also contributed little to the ancestry of domestic ones though they share close habitat in East Asia. Interestingly, among the domestic Bactrian camels, those from Iran exhibited the largest genetic distance and the earliest split from all others in the phylogeny, in spite of evident admixture between domestic Bactrian camels and dromedaries living in Central Asia. Taken together, our study supported the Central Asian origin of domestic Bactrian camels, which were then immigrated eastward to Mongolia where native wild Bactrian camels inhabited.

sample.xlsx

Sample information of 128 camels, including NCBI accessions, sample names and populations.

variant.filtered.vcf.zip

Variants of 128 camels aftering filtering (vcf format).

Fig1A_diversity.zip

Nucleotide diversity π of each population calculated with vcftools.

Fig1B_Fst.zip

Pairwise population differentiation Fst calculated with vcftools.

Fig2A_MDS.zip

A pruned subset of SNPs (ped format) and MDS calculated with plinks.

Fig2B_admixture.zip

Results of Admixture anlysis (K = 3-5).

Fig2C_treemix.zip

Input file of Treemix analysis.

Fig3A_Dstats.txt

D and fd statistics for 100-kb windows across the genome.

Fig3B_Fst.zip

Fst of regions with non-significant fd values.

Fig3C_mtDNA.fasta

Full-length mtDNA sequences (fasta format).

Fig4_GPhoCS.zip

Control files (.ctl), sequence files (.seq) and result files (.out) in GPhoCS analysis.