Panda meat? Anyone?

[Cecil Lee]

Prehistoric man had panda for dinner: Scientist

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

Mr Wei Guanbiao, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said in a newspaer interview that prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in southwest China.

He said excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

He said that "in primitive times, people wouldn't kill animals that were useless to them", and therefore the pandas must have been used as food. Mr Wei said wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains between 10,000 and 1 million years ago.

[myfs_157844]

Bear meat is darker and fattier than beef, although similar in flavor. The problem with the comparison, though, is that an animal?s diet greatly affects the flavor of its own flesh. Bears that dine mainly on salmon, for example, taste worse than those with a more varied diet.