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On December 31, 2020, The Paper launched the "World Living Room" New Year's Eve special session, where five young scholars gathered at the North Bund in Hongkou District, Shanghai to discuss the boundaries between science and technology and humanities. In the year 2020 that has just passed, various "black swans" have flown together, and in the new year, how we will coexist with uncertainty.
Speaker He Xin, an associate researcher at the Shanghai Museum of Natural History, believes that the epidemic should become an opportunity, and human beings need to reflect on the distance between humans and wild animals again.
The following is an excerpt of the speech compiled by The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) for the benefit of readers.
In the past year, I believe many friends have thought about such a question: what happened to people and animals, people and nature? In the course of human history, how should we get along with wild animals and nature?
This outbreak stems from the coronavirus, which is essentially a natural phenomenon in the biological world. Many people wonder, why does the virus attack humans?
Compared with humans, viruses are very simple organisms, and even some scholars believe that viruses cannot be called real organisms because they only have a simple outer membrane and nucleic acid structure.
As a single-stranded RNA virus, the new coronavirus seems to have a simple structure, but to this day, we have not been able to reduce such a disease to normal disease levels. Worldwide, the number of COVID-19 patients is still increasing. China has done a good job in epidemic prevention, and in some scenes, people can take off their masks to live, but the world is still in crisis.
At the beginning of the epidemic, people pointed the finger at animals. In fact, wild animals, like humans, carry bacteria and viruses, but many times, they do not transmit to humans. The synergy between viruses and hosts often lasts for tens of millions of years, perhaps because humans inadvertently interrupt some of these steps, bringing about a crisis.
Back in the original Wuhan, many people will think of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. At one time, you can see a variety of animals in the market, some look like domestic animals, some are relatively rare, not directly accessible to people in their daily lives, and some may not be found even in zoos, such as marmots, porcupines, raccoons, which are concentrated in the small space of the market and sold openly. Viruses across different species need a "hotbed" for breeding, but humans have created such a "hotbed" in the market.
Many scientists have done research and speculated that the new crown virus may come from pangolins, bats, or other different species, but it is still inconclusive.
Going back in time to SARS in 2003, scientists conducted long-term studies and determined that the civet was an intermediate host, and its terminal host was a human, which should have originated from bats at the beginning.
Many people believe that bats are the "devils" that bring diseases to humans, but before this epidemic, people can find wild game shops and wild game restaurants through various channels, just to satisfy their own appetite or selfish desires. Wildlife protection management departments and researchers have been engaged in the protection and rescue of wild animals, but it is difficult to ban them.
In recent years, laws and regulations have made great efforts, and these incidents seem to have decreased, but there are still outcrops. On December 10, 2020, a case was uncovered on Chongming Island in Shanghai where nearly 700 weasels were illegally hunted.
Many people think that weasels are "unkind to chickens" and not "good animals", but studies have proved that weasels have great ecological value - more often than poultry, weasels are natural enemies of rats.
Nearly 700 weasels have been hunted down in Chongming alone, and their flesh is used to make pickled foods, fur into crafts, and even clothes.
In December 2020, the epidemic gradually calmed down in China, but even in cities like Shanghai, similar incidents are re-emerging. It is conceivable that nationwide, the killing of wild animals and the improper contact with wild animals continue.
When encountering problems, many people will think that humans should be isolated from wild animals, should not approach them, and should even be swept away, but when the problem slows down, many people repeat the same mistakes, thinking that wild animals are used to eat and can be played with, this is the problem!
Going back to SARS in 2003, many people see the civet beaver — whose standard name is the flower-faced beaver — and think it's the "culprit." In fact, the civet itself is a widely distributed small carnivore in southern China, living mainly in subtropical forests, and humans do not have much opportunity to touch it, but it once appeared on the table.
Bats too. In early 2020, in Shanghai's Minhang district, some residents found bats in their ceilings and called the wildlife protection department to let them clean up the bats, and even said "kill them directly." But are all bats spreading disease?
It looks like bats live all around us, but in fact it's far away from humans. Bats are sometimes found at night and barely visible during the day – a microcosm of the relationship between humans and wildlife, bats struggling to adapt to their human environment while we humans turn a blind eye to them.
Bats are typical of adapting to the environment. Many people think that bats are a very small class of animals, but there are nearly a thousand species of them.
In China, especially in the cold north, bats are not common. But in tropical regions, such as Southeast Asia, we often see bats living around people, and relatively speaking, they do not have much conflict with people.
A lot of people will "talk about bat discoloration". Looking back at history, the Chinese people once regarded the bat as a symbol of beauty, because its name has the meaning of "fu". But people know very little about bats in China, and even less about bats in Shanghai.
When we have problems, people blame wildlife, but we don't even know what kinds of wildlife they are, what areas they live in, what the population is, and it's a huge problem.
Humans are just one of more than 5,000 species of mammals. When we think of ourselves as the primates of the world, the masters of the world, we need to realize that not all mammals depend entirely on humans for their survival.
Mammalian taxa. Image source: He Xin
In the mammal taxa, (in the picture above) the blue area is our most "unsightly" rodents, including mice, rabbits, orange is bats, and the area where humans are located is primates, there are many primates, but the number of all primates is far less than that of humans.
Historically, what has been the relationship between humans and wildlife? There is a mural in the early history of mankind in which animals are the prey of man. When humans first left Africa for the world, humans were predators for wildlife. But from the very beginning, were humans predators? This is not the case.
Hunting scenes from early humans. Image source: He Xin
This diagram shows how humans hunted in the early days of civilization. For the most part, humans relied on the first animal that was domesticated— the dog. In biology, dogs and wolves are actually the same species, domesticated by humans about 36,000 years ago. With domestication, humans began to spread throughout the world.
Humans left Africa as early as 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then to Asia, during which more animals were domesticated and became a major food source for humans. For example, pigs were domesticated 9,000 years ago, original cattle from 8,000 years ago became domestic cattle today, and goats and pan sheep today are from European wild goats 10,000 years ago. There are also domestic horses that have played a huge role in human history, which were domesticated more than 6,000 years ago, and donkeys.
Scholars believe that some animals are not domesticated by humans, but actively approach humans and are actively domesticated, such as cats.
For these animals, humans are domesticated, and in a way, we become the masters of the fate of this part of the wild animals. But compared to all the mammals and birds on Earth, these domesticated animals are very few.
On May 29, 2020, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued the National Inventory of Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources, which clearly stipulates that people are allowed to eat and domesticated animals, 17 kinds of traditional livestock and poultry, and 16 kinds of special livestock and poultry, including silver fox, arctic fox and raccoon, which are non-food animals.
Looking back at the animals in the Wuhan market, including many popular animal videos on the Internet today, the animals that appear in them are not on this list.
World Parlor live. The Paper's reporter Zhu Weihui figured
Traditional human domesticated livestock and poultry have a history of 5,000 to 10,000 years of domestication, special livestock and poultry may have gone through hundreds of years of domestication history, and wild animals (in the market, popular videos) that humans directly contact may be captured directly from the wild, which may be the source of the virus - because it has not undergone thousands or tens of thousands of years of screening.
We often say that humans are monkeys. In fact, the evolution of this species of human beings has been accompanied by the rise and fall of the entire history of the earth. Many people think that the early days of human evolution were some primates from the forest to the grasslands, but why do primates go to the grasslands to live? This is closely related to the history of the earth and the changes in wildlife.
Many times, we refer to early human fossils as "so-and-so", but calling chimpanzees chimpanzees, chimpanzees are only 6 million years away from our history of differentiation, the next time we go to the zoo to see chimpanzees, is it possible to think about the question: How far are people and animals?
Australopithecus is the first family source of humanity that we can trace back to, flourishing in Africa 5 million years ago. In East Africa, they left the forest and came to the steppes. For example, the famous LUCY fossil, the Shanghai Museum of Natural History has its replica, and the museum in Kenya today also preserves the remains of the footprints of australopithecus, which looks no different from the current human beings, but the faces and images are more similar to chimpanzees.
What was the relationship between Australopithecus and wild animals at that time? The former is the prey of the latter. These animals look very similar to today's tigers and lions, but their size is not as large as today's tigers and lions, only the size of today's leopards. In other words, being a predator was the fate of the original human race.
In the process, humans gradually developed some wisdom, including the use of tools, when the relationship between us and these animals that originally preyed on us reversed.
In the beginning, we became its competitors, and could seize the food that other animals preyed on and become our food. After that, we developed into true human beings, and after becoming fully human, human beings began to really go to the top of the food chain. We began to dominate the entire earth's environment within the human genera, and that's when we started to go out of Africa, which is Homo sapiens.
After Homo sapiens left Africa, it replaced Homo erectus, which was once distributed in other parts of the world - the well-known Peking Ape Man is a kind of Homo erectus, which has also been replaced by Homo sapiens who came out of Africa. In the process of substitution, Homo sapiens uses a variety of stone tools and tools.
Homo sapiens left Africa 50,000 years ago. And what happened to animals as humans traveled around the world? They need to adapt to such a new predator as humans in just a few tens of thousands of years. Primitive tribes in Africa can still be seen today, and when primitive tribesmen appeared, lions would abandon their prey and stay away from them—this is the position that humans have established on earth.
So in the beginning, humans were not the top predators, and for tens of thousands of years, as humans became predators, large animals began to disappear with human history, and such "disappearances" were common in history and in various fossil evidences.
For example, the mammoth, called the "true mammoth", was extinct far more than just the true mammoth. His family also had different mammoths, such as the larger steppe mammoth and the southern mammoth, which disappeared in that era, either because of humans or because of changes in the environment. Also disappearing were the woolly rhinoceros and plate-toothed rhinoceros, which were larger than the rhinos of today.
At that time, the environment in which they lived was the recent ice age, such a Xiaoice Sichuan era was actually the embryo of human society. Why? Why did human ancestors come out of Africa? Why did you get down from the trees and walk to the prairie? Its roots lie in the fluctuation of the Earth's climate due to changes in glaciers, and the transformation of the original forests of eastern Africa into grasslands, which is the most fundamental climatic evidence of human emergence.
In this process, humans not only hunted herbivores, but also disappeared from the commonly known as "saber-toothed tigers" distributed in Eurasia, as well as cave lions, hyenas, giant hyenas, and cave bears, which look somewhat similar to today's African animals, but tens of thousands of years ago, China, Europe, and even the rest of the world were full of such large animals, and now the only place where large animals can be found is Africa.
Why haven't African animals disappeared? One theory is that African animals are watching the growth process of human beings and adapting to the continuous development and change of human "weapons". And when humans went to Europe and Asia, the animals there did not have time to adapt to those "well-armed" Homo sapiens.
Then we began to move from hunting to settling, and settled life depended on the domestication of large domestic animals and families that we humans had sifted out over a period of ten thousand years.
Back to the question, why eat wild animals? Are wild animals suitable for humans to eat? Our ancestors have spent tens of thousands of years telling us that it is not suitable, and we have exterminated a large number of animals.
When Homo sapiens walked to Australia, Australia's large animals disappeared. The American continent originally had a large number of large animals that could compete with Eurasia and even the African savannah, and disappeared with the arrival of Homo sapiens, such as mastodons, Colombian mammoths, dire wolves, and short-faced bears. When Homo sapiens went to South America, the large animals of South America also disappeared.
Today, when people can find giraffes and elephants in Africa, they will think that they are very large, but the world was full of large animals, and at the end of the ice age, they left this world with human development. And now is the era of the absence of large animals in the history of the earth, which is not an atypical era.
There is a lot of evidence that when Homo sapiens traveled around the world, the earth underwent a fundamental change. Many people think that this is the period of ignorance of human beings, who do not know how to get along with wild animals.
But "disappearing" didn't stop there in that era. The Shanghai Museum of Natural History has a "wall of extinct animals" on which other animals appear, such as the dodo, which became extinct in 1681, the great sea cow (extinct in) 1768, and the great auk in 1844. It's getting closer to today, with the once-overwhelming passenger pigeons extinct in 1914 and the Australian thylacine in 1936. These are the world's most classic and famous extinct animals, and many more extinct animals and plants, and many people have never heard their names at all.
Nearly a hundred years? Extinctions are still happening.
A few years ago, an article in the journal Nature identified the world's most urgent hotspots for biodiversity conservation, with red zones indicating high biodiversity but also a great threat. Many parts of China are under such threat. Many scientists believe that the Earth has been experiencing its sixth mass extinction since the beginning of hundreds of thousands of years.
People may know that dinosaurs were caused by mass extinctions, but many people do not know that there have been five "mass extinctions" on Earth – in fact, the Earth has experienced a large number of extinction events, five of which are considered "mass extinctions", and today's era of human beings, the crisis caused by humans to wildlife has been comparable to these five mass extinction events.
At present, the world's population is nearly 7.6 billion, and the Shanghai Natural History Museum has a screen that displays the number of the earth's population, which will soon jump to 80. But how many other animals are there among primates? The most may be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and the few may be only a few dozen, or even a dozen, such as the Hainan gibbon distributed on China's Hainan Island.
The IUCN classifies endangered species, such as "extinct", or "threatened", and there is a lot of data to indicate how many species are "threatened" in the world.
In addition to the new crown pneumonia, in recent decades, many of the world's most famous diseases have been related to the way humans and wild animals get along. Even if we can contain the outbreak now, it does not mean that similar incidents will never happen again.
Mammals and birds are directly observable. When I do my own research, I often go to the coastline of East China, and I can see that the habitat of birds is changing dramatically, and the number of birds is decreasing.
In the process of this change, the decline of wildlife populations is the most significant feedback in nature, and the main reason is the hunting of humans and the loss and fragmentation of habitats.
We can see that forests are being cut down in large quantities, land is being overgrazed, and natural habitats that originally belong to wild animals are being completely transformed by humans, followed by desertification of land, the abuse of pesticides and fertilizers, and conflicts between humans and wildlife after their homes are occupied by livestock and humans. Air pollution, water pollution, plastic pollution is accompanied by the development of industrial civilization and can not be cleaned up.
The human population has exploded since the 18th and 19th centuries, and the explosion of population has become the most unbearable weight on the planet. Today, more than half of all humans live in the new environment that humans have created on Earth – cities. With urbanization, the illegal trade in wildlife has intensified, with ivory, rhino horn, pangolin flakes, tiger bones, and more to name a few. And the birds and small mammals that live around humans are still being slaughtered.
Throughout the history of the earth, humans have been a particularly small part of it. People often use the "Earth's Biological Clock", and humans only appear in the last few moments.
There have been a large number of magnificent life in the history of the earth, and they may disappear due to changes in the earth. In fact, the threat posed by each extinction is much greater than that posed by humans. In fact, the earth does not care at all about what changes we will make to the earth, climate change is a big concept, because the earth's ecosystem we have changed is only the last tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years that human beings have adapted, when everything is gradually disordered and eventually irresistible, I am afraid that we will become the final victims.
People think that The Earth is a great planet, but it is only a very small planet in the universe.
So how should humans and animals get along? Initially, humans domesticated only a few species of mammals and birds, and gradually occupied the main body of the earth, which is the world that humans have changed. If we are not alert and continue to have improper contact with wild animals and even kill, the next disease will still come.
We expect that 2021 will be the year to restore order, as a species, human beings can survive longer on this earth, which is what we as Homo sapiens, an intelligent species, should do.
Editor-in-charge: Wu Yingyan
Proofreader: Yan Zhang