> Pangolins and bats don't usually cohabitate, making this somewhat unlikely in nature.
Horseshoe bats are nocturnal animals that roost in caves during the day but sometimes practice perch feeding at night [1]:
> The other strategy is known as perch feeding: Individuals roost on feeding perches and wait for prey to fly past, then fly out to capture it.
Pangolins [2] and palm civets [3] are nocturnal and arboreal. The bat viral RNA sequences come from anal swabs of netted animals so they are primarily gastrointestinal infections. All of these animals are found in the Lancang/Mekong [4] catch basin. Bat guano seems like a good vector for the virus.
Gain-of-function experiments require two viral isolates that recombine during passage. The lab theory assumes that the RNA sequence of the original viral isolates were never shared. I find this scenario unlikely but I am open to changing my mind based on evidence. SARS-1 is evidence of a very similar zoonotic scenario.
Humans that encounter bat guano in this region also seem like a good host for a recombination event.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_bat#Diet_and_foragin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin#Behavior
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_palm_civet#Feeding_and_d...
So are you proposing that a pangolin from Lancang was transported more than 2000km to a seafood wetmarket in Wuhan?
At face value, this sounds like a very unlikely scenario for a zoonotic event/origin.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/04/coronavir...
The often believed but not proven
>"start of this pandemic was in 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market' in Wuhan."
To:
> It was produced in a Lab.
Is IMHO a fully unreasonable jump of conclusions. Given that analysis in the recent year showed that the virus spread much earlier and initially undetected to the EU it is quite feasible that the epidemic in China started earlier and potential in different places then Wuhan.
Also one big point ignored is both pangolin and bat are captured (sometimes alive) and kept/transported potentially close together. So even if there is a natural place where they would interact there are "unnatural" places created by the nature of the (not just seafood) marked in Wuhan...
Bats can easily come in close contacts with people and cattle even when they are not actively hunted.
You also make a good point that we're discovering very early cases in the EU and US, which show that this all started earlier than the explosion in Wuhan.
I seem to recall reading articles suggesting that the jump to humans may have occurred more than a year before Wuhan.