A Chinese scientist recently made a pretty bold claim. According to evidence found by the Three Gorges Paleoanthropology group at the Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, ancient men and women used to eat pandas. The scientist, Wei Guangbiao, says a study of excavated panda fossils first produced the evidence.
Guangbiao, a writer and paleoanthropologist, also says the excavation produced evidence that pandas used to be routinely killed with man-made weapons.
"We have studied many samples of the panda fossils excavated in Chongqing from the sites where humans once lived. A large number of them showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man.”
While slashing seems more cruel than necessary, the Hindustan Times is reporting early humans would not kill unless necessary for food or survival, prompting Guangbio’s claim that the animals were cut up and parts of them were eaten.
As weird and stringy as panda meat sounds, those cute black and white critters of prehistoric times were not quite the same as the gentle, giant bears we know today. Instead pandas were miniaturized, more numerous, and found living in areas spread across a much larger region. For between 10,000 and 1 million years, the pandas wandered across a space in Chongqing before branching out into other habitats after a large bamboo die off. In other words, they were cute as kittens, but they weren’t endangered species, and prehistoric men and women quite enjoyed them. I just wonder if they were a delicacy, or an everyday sort of meal.
