This bit of essentially non-news is popping up every where:

Chinese Scientist Says Prehistoric Man Ate Pandas

China’s beloved national symbol — the panda — may have been seen quite differently by ancient humans: as food.

Scientist Wei Guangbiao says prehistoric man ate pandas in an area that is now part of the city of Chongqing in southwest China.

Wei, 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 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.

source

1) Why is it so shocking that they might have eaten Panda?
2) Hunting could also have been for the fur, not the meat (or for both)
3) It is nonsense that prehistoric people only killed for utilitarian purposes;
4) Apart that they did kill solely for the fun of it only, there is also the factor: “Whoa, big dangerous bear! Kill it!” involved

Is it possible to tell if the Pandas were eaten? Would the bones show signs of the flesh being taken off or even cooked?

Since meat was not so easily gotten then and typically required both strategy and numbers even to bring down large game, it’s most likely that any animal killed was completely utilized so the meat, fur, bones and even teeth would be put to use. 

dammit, still no “tastes like chicken” jokes. This website is going down…
fast

hulitoons - 15 October 2012 10:24 AM

Since meat was not so easily gotten then and typically required both strategy and numbers even to bring down large game, it’s most likely that any animal killed was completely utilized so the meat, fur, bones and even teeth would be put to use.

Actually, no. There are many known cases, archaeologically and ethnographically, where only parts of a kill were utilized. Prehistoric people were much more “wasteful” than many people think, and on occasion had much less concern for their environment and the effects of their actions on it than many people think. The whole romantic idea of prehistoric (or modern) hunter-gatherers being “in tune” with nature, not overexploiting it and not wasting it etcetera, is BS. They recklessly exploited the environment just as we do. But because they were with a world population of 700,000 instead of 7 Billion, the effects were much less notable.
Also, prehistoric people, from the times of Neandertals onwards, were quite capable and prolific hunters. People tend to underestimate what prehistoric people could achieve.

Peter - 15 October 2012 04:43 AM

Is it possible to tell if the Pandas were eaten? Would the bones show signs of the flesh being taken off or even cooked?

I think (I only have the news item to go by, haven’t seen a scientific paper on it yet) they probably base their conclusions on cutmarks on the bones and maybe bone breakage patterns. Those are actually the only kind of evidence you can base such a conclusion on.