Humans used to eat pandas, according to findings made by a Chinese scientist.

Evidence that prehistoric man ate the bears has been found in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China, Wei Guangbiao said.

Mr Wei, the head of the Institute of Three Gorges Palaeoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said many excavated fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him as saying: "In primitive times, people wouldn't kill animals that were useless to them," and therefore the pandas must have been used as food.

But he said pandas were much smaller then.

Mr Wei added that wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains 10,000 to a million years ago.

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