Chiba Minoru, Hirano Takahiro, Yamazaki Daishi, Ye Bin, Ito Shun, Kagawa Osamu, Endo Komei, Nishida Shu, Hara Seiji, Aratake Kenichiro, Chiba Satoshi
Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, Miyagi, Japan.
Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University, Miyagi, Japan.
PNAS Nexus. 2022 Nov 30;1(5):pgac245. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac245. eCollection 2022 Nov.
Knowing how the present distribution of organisms was formed is an essential issue in evolutionary ecology. Recently, the distribution of organisms on Earth has been significantly changed by human-mediated dispersal due to globalization. Therefore, significant attention has been paid to such processes. However, although humankind has taken considerable time to achieve modernization, the impact of ancient human activity on ecosystems has not yet been thoroughly studied. We hypothesized that ancient urban development and transitions had a non-negligible effect on species distribution. Inferring the impact of past human activity on ecosystems from ancient literature and verifying that impact by genetic analysis and human history is an effective means of tackling this problem. As geckos, a popular neighbor of human dwellings, are good material for this model, we performed this combination approach using Schlegel's Japanese gecko, . We show that migrated from China to the western Japanese archipelago before Christ. The gecko species dispersed itself from western to eastern the archipelago on a time scale of thousands of years. There are many synchronizations between the dispersal history of and the historical development of human society. It is suggested by such synchronizations that humans have influenced the distribution of many times throughout its dispersal history.
了解生物当前的分布是如何形成的，这是进化生态学中的一个重要问题。近年来，由于全球化，人类介导的扩散显著改变了地球上生物的分布。因此，此类过程受到了极大关注。然而，尽管人类实现现代化花费了相当长的时间，但古代人类活动对生态系统的影响尚未得到充分研究。我们推测古代城市发展和变迁对物种分布有着不可忽视的影响。从古代文献中推断过去人类活动对生态系统的影响，并通过基因分析和人类历史来验证这种影响，是解决这一问题的有效方法。由于壁虎作为人类住所常见的邻居，是适用于该模型的良好材料，我们使用史氏日本壁虎进行了这种综合方法的研究。我们发现，在基督诞生之前，史氏日本壁虎就已从中国迁移至日本西部群岛。这种壁虎物种在数千年的时间尺度上从该群岛西部扩散至东部。史氏日本壁虎的扩散历史与人类社会的历史发展之间存在许多同步现象。这些同步现象表明，在史氏日本壁虎的整个扩散历史中，人类多次对其分布产生了影响。
