To be clear after reading the article[0] this means "probably came from horseshoe bats" not "probably came from this particular cave which happens to be in Yunn

To be clear after reading the article[0] this means "probably came from horseshoe bats" not "probably came from this particular cave which happens to be in Yunnan" or even "probably came from Yunnan". You can see from the phylogenetic tree (figure 6) that they have heavily sampled Yunnan and Hong Kong but there is only one sample from Guizhou and there are none from other nearby locations. There are thousands of caves over this entire region, owing to the dominant limestone and karst topography on this edge of the Himalayas. Less scientifically, Yunnan is a long way from Guangdong and has zero popular history of eating or handling bats. People from remote parts of Yunnan where bats live do not often travel to Guangdong. While bats are known to harbour different viruses, I am calling bullshit on Yunnan as the source of SARS. There are many populations of bats in caves far closer to Guangdong such as far northeast Vietnam, Guangxi, Guizhou and probably Hunan and Fujian provinces which would be preferable choices for source populations of trapped wild bats. [0] http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...