Early humans used to eat pandas, a Chinese scientist has claimed.

Wei Guangbiao said prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China.

Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said excavated panda 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 in prehistoric times.

Wei said wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains 10,000 to 1m years ago.