You've misunderstood the article that you linked. Scientists found SARS-1 in civet cats and raccoon dogs within about a year of the first human outbreaks. We be

You've misunderstood the article that you linked. Scientists found SARS-1 in civet cats and raccoon dogs within about a year of the first human outbreaks. We believe these are the animals that first transmitted SARS-1 to humans. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5241a2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5241a2.htm Much later, Dr. Zhengli Shi found viruses related to SARS-1 in bats. These bat viruses are more distant genetically from the human samples than the civet and racoon dog viruses were; but they're significant because of the prevalence and diversity of such viruses. This suggests that SARS-1 evolved mostly in bats (the reservoir hosts), then spilled to civets and racoon dogs (the proximal hosts) and evolved a little more, then spilled to humans. SARS-CoV-2 is close enough genetically to SARS-1 that we knew immediately that the reservoir host was bats. The proximal host still hasn't been found, despite the much greater effort to search. This doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is necessarily unnatural, since the exact zoonotic transmission path is still unknown for other viruses that are certainly of natural origin (e.g. Ebola). It's different from both SARS-1 and MERS, though.