A CHINESE scientist says that humans used to eat pandas.

In a newspaper interview, Wei Guangbiao says prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in southwest China.

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

The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him on Friday 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 says pandas were much smaller then.

Mr Wei says wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains 10,000 to 1 million years ago.

Pandas don't eat much apart from bamboo.

Originally published as 'Prehistoric man ate pandas'