Chinese archaeologists find first complete panda burial in 2,000-year-old Han dynasty tomb
- The animal, which may have been kept as a status symbol, had been sacrificed and buried with the Emperor Wen, who died in 157 BCE
- Although a panda’s skull was found in another Han dynasty tomb, this is the first time a complete skeleton has been found buried in such a manner
Chinese archaeologists have found what they claim is the first complete skeleton of a giant panda in a Han dynasty emperor’s tomb dating back more than 2,000 years.
The giant panda is thought to have been sacrificed to accompany the emperor Emperor Wen, who reigned from 180 to 157 BCE, into the afterlife.
The animal’s remains were lying in a satellite pit, with its head facing in the direction of the tomb.
The tomb is in the modern day city of Xian in Shaanxi province, once the capital of China.
Hu Songmei, an archaeologist at the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology, said this was the first time that a complete panda skeleton had been found in an emperor’s tomb.
She said archaeologists had found the skull of a giant panda in the tomb of Emperor Wen’s mother Consort Bo in 1975 but the body was missing.
Archeologists have found a large variety of wild animals, which they believe were a status symbol for the Han rulers, in Shaanxi’s royal tombs.
Hu said her team had also found the skeleton of an Asian tapir – which became extinct in China about 1,000 years ago and is now listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature – in the tomb.
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Tigers and yaks were also buried with the emperor, while his mother’s tomb contained the remains of a red-crowned crane, a peacock, a snub-nosed monkey and tortoise.
Hu said the rare, wild animals only appeared in the tombs of the emperor, empress and the emperor’s mother and said some of them may have been offerings from southern China.
However, she also said it was possible that there were more pandas in Shaanxi during the Han dynasty, suggesting the climate in the province was wetter and warmer than it is today, allowing bamboo to grow.
Hu said archaeologists would carry out a DNA analysis on the animals to identify what they ate and where they came from.
Previously archaeologists found a new – and now extinct – species of gibbon in the tomb of Lady Xia, the grandmother of China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang.
