"Like" all the way to the north, so many times have happened in millions of years!

Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, June 11 (Reporters Gemdale and Dong Ruifeng) This time the wild elephants from Yunnan moved to the north and "walked for food" all the way, attracting a lot of attention
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If you count the time in millions of years, you will be surprised to find that in geological history, elephants have frequently and on a large scale "back and forth" between the north and the south of our country

Reporters recently learned from the Chinese Kexue Yuan and Paleoanthropology of Vertebrate Paleontology learned that Wang Qi of the team based on the study of existing fossils, like the kind outlined thousands of years of north-south "migration map "

Researcher Wang Shiqi introduced that elephants appeared in China for about 19 million years.
The study found that elephants that originated in Africa may have arrived from the unuplifted Qinghai-Tibet region about 24 million years ago.
Northern China, including cog elephants, yoke tooth elephants and so on
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After that, as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau rose, this migration route was blocked, and the elephants turned to "diversion" to Yunnan and migrated northward via central and eastern China

"About 18 million years ago, the ridged elephants that appeared in eastern China may have migrated north from China's Yunnan or Southeast Asia, and eventually even reached Japan
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" Wang Shiqi said

In history, due to climate change and other reasons, elephants have repeatedly "moved" from north to south
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Wang Shiqi told reporters that Yunnan is not only an important "passage" for elephants to move north in history, southern China, including Yunnan, is also a "refuge" for elephants

"About 6 million years ago, the world entered a warm and humid period.
Sabertooth and Chinese mastodon appeared in Yunnan
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Since then, they have entered the north together, leaving many fossils including the Yellow River elephant

When did the Asian elephants that have attracted much attention this time appear? Wang Shiqi told reporters that the Asian elephant genus appeared in China about 1.
5 million years ago
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As the earth entered the warm period of the Holocene about 10,000 years ago, all mammoths and saber-toothed elephants became extinct, leaving only the Asian elephants living on the territory of China

"In addition to being more adapted to the warm environment, Asian elephants have a wider range of food than saber-toothed elephants that also live in the south, so they survived
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During the Yin and Shang dynasties, Asian elephants were distributed in the Yellow River basin.