In this article we reveal that the new coronavirus genomes from Asia contain sufficient information to narrow down the geographical source of the direct bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 to a quite small region, the south-central part of the Chinese province of Yunnan. In other words, this analysis identifies with good confidence and quite precisely the location where a bat virus that ultimately became SARS-CoV-2 left its bat reservoir host, initiating the chain of events that led to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis does not specify the precise nature of this initiation event. The jump out of bats may have been into an intermediate host (that later went on to infect a human), or it may have been a jump directly into a human; or even the virus may have been procured as part of a research project.

Nevertheless, such a very substantial narrowing of the location of the jump from bats represents a major step forward. Its implications for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are profound because the requirement for a Yunnan connection markedly constrains origin theories. For example, advocates of the imported frozen food theory favoured in China now have to explain how imported food came to Wuhan carrying a virus from Yunnan (Zhou and Shi, 2021). Likewise, ideas that have circulated about possible European origins of the virus must now explain how a European patient zero could have acquired that virus from Yunnan. Also importantly, the bioweapon theory of Dr Li-Meng Yan is ruled out by the newly discovered viruses discussed here.

But perhaps the greatest significance of this finding will turn out to be that the region of Yunnan indicated as the likely geographic origin is centred on a place called the Mojiang mine. This mine is already well-known to COVID-19 origins investigators.

We favour this theory because it explains numerous otherwise puzzling features of SARS-CoV-2. These features are (1) the high improbability of a zoonotic appearance of a SARS-related coronavirus in Wuhan; (2) the apparently pre-adapted nature of the virus to humans (Piplani et al., 2021; van Dorp et al., 2020; Zhan et al, 2020); (3) a miner’s passage predicts a single zoonotic jump to humans [which fits the data on early human sequences (Bloom, 2021)] and which is inconsistent with most viral zoonoses, which typically feature multiple jumps into humans; (4) a miner-derived virus also explains the proclivity of SARS-CoV-2 for human lungs, which is a characteristic that many coronaviruses lack; (5) the theory can also explain the extensive attempts to deny or obscure research occurring at the WIV (see also the Zhou P. et al., 2020a addendum). The Mojiang miners hypothesis even has an evolutionary explanation for the infamous furin cleavage site. However, none of this precludes the possibility that the miner-derived virus was also lab-altered.

Since the theory specifically postulates that patient zero was a Mojiang miner who acquired one or more SARS-CoV-2-related viruses directly from the bats in the mine, the miners passaging theory matches perfectly the phylogeography of SARS-CoV-2 lineage revealed above. Indeed, it is an explicit prediction of the Mojiang miner passage theory that SARS-CoV-2 is composed of viruses originating there. Consequently, a miner passage origin is also consistent with SARS-CoV-2 being a mosaic of RmYN02, RpYN06, PrC31 and RaTG13 since, as the phylogeography shows, these viruses, or their close relatives, could have been present in the mine when the miners fell ill.

A miner passage is therefore not just compatible with but greatly strengthened by all the new evidence from wild viruses that has emerged since the pandemic began.