When I first visited the Jinsha Site Museum in Chengdu a few years ago, I was stunned by the bundles of ivory, which the staff told me was only a small part of it, and most of the tusks that had been unearthed had been backfilled to prevent carbonization.
I never imagined that the land I lived in had once been so wild, and I began to wonder when and what caused the elephants to disappear from here.
I searched the Internet and finally found two books written by American scholars (unfortunately, I did not find relevant works by domestic scholars), namely "The Retreat of the Elephant - A History of China's Environment" and "Chinese Environmental History - From Prehistory to Modern Times" (the latter one is more readable), which answered my doubts. It turned out that four thousand years ago, elephants were distributed on the vast land from north China to Sichuan in the north, and the climate at that time was warmer and wetter than it is now, suitable for the survival of elephants, and at that time, human civilization was still in the Hongmeng period, the productivity was low, and the impact on the environment was almost negligible.
Then, as the Earth's climate cooled slightly and, more importantly, squeezed by human activity, elephants began to retreat from north to south. However, even three thousand years ago, the number of elephants in the north was still considerable, for example, the reason why Henan is referred to as "Yu" is because there were many elephants at that time (it is said that the beasts in front of many office buildings in Henan are stone elephants instead of stone lions or unicorns). Fifteen hundred years ago, elephants had disappeared from the north and retreated south of the Yangtze River Basin. A thousand years ago, it retreated to Lingnan and southwest China. Of course, there are some repetitions, but the general trend is so. Until now, only wild elephants in China have survived in Yunnan and the border areas of Myanmar and Laos.
Elephants suffer the same thing as rhinos, once widespread throughout China, and disappeared from China in the early 20th century. Because ivory and rhino horn are easy to preserve and find, and chinese written records for thousands of years also provide evidence, it is easier to outline their approximate distribution range.
Another animal with indicative significance is the tiger. Like elephants, tigers need well-preserved forests to survive. Over the millennia, tigers have also gradually degraded their distribution areas. There are three species of tigers native to China, namely the Siberian tiger, the Xinjiang tiger and the South China tiger. Wild Siberian tigers are currently only seen in the border areas between China and Russia, the Xinjiang tiger (also known as the Central Asian tiger) became extinct in the last century, and the South China tiger was also extinct in the last century, but the situation is not the same, it was eliminated in an organized and planned manner.
Until the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were about 4,000 wild South China tigers in China, which is a considerable number, and india, which currently has the largest number of tigers in the world, has only more than 2,000. But what is sad is that in the 1950s and 1960s, a huge "tiger fighting movement" was set off, and "tiger fighting teams" were set up in places where tigers were active, encouraging hunters and militias to hunt tigers, and sometimes even using troops to go into the mountains to encircle and suppress them. In just 20 years, tigers have been wiped out in China, and now the distribution area of tigers almost coincides with China's national borders.
It's strange why wild animals such as elephants, rhinos, and tigers have disappeared from China's soil (of course, the list is still very long, Przewalski's wild horses, Chinese guinea deer, high-nosed antelope, Taiwanese clouded leopards, white-rumped langurs, small-toothed civet cats... Do we Chinese feud with wild animals?
In a sense, this is the inevitable result of China's agricultural civilization for thousands of years. It is very simple to say that agriculture needs arable land, cultivated land comes from nature (mainly forests), more arable land means less forest, especially since the Ming and Qing dynasties, along with potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and other high-yield crops from the Americas into China, the number of people has soared, exacerbating the contradiction between man and land, of course, can only further to the natural world "open up the land". Originally, China's vast land except the northwest was covered by forests, but after thousands of years of reclamation, China's primary forests have been left, and habitat destruction has become a decisive factor in the extinction of wild animals.
What is even more frightening is that the small peasant ideology, which is based on agricultural civilization, regards any factor that may destroy agriculture as harmful, from elephants and tigers to small sparrows, all of which are regarded as "pest beasts" and "pest birds", which are the objects to be eliminated. In addition, ivory, rhino horn, tiger bones, tiger skins, etc. have always been profitable rarities, so they are constantly hunted and killed by people, and in modern times, with the proliferation of guns, the fate of large wild animals is also doomed.
Our land in China, which is uniquely described, is a great land, with four distinct seasons and great diversity of organisms, and many species that have flourished on this land for millions of years have disappeared or are on the verge of extinction, which cannot but be said to be a pity. Fortunately, in recent years, the state has increased its environmental protection efforts, "green water and green mountains are golden mountains and silver mountains" has gradually become a social consensus, I hope that in the future, there will no longer be a kind of creature disappearing from this land, truly realize the harmonious coexistence between man and nature, and let the Land of China always maintain its vitality.