Giant pandas represent a symbol in the fight for preserving the biodiversity of the world. A couple of decades ago, there were less than 1,500.

Today, there are 3,000 giant panda bears living in bamboo rich coniferous forests, on over 23,000 square km, in 6 mountain massifs of southwestern China, in the middle of the Yangtze basin, with an altitude between 2,000-3,200 m (6,600-10,600 ft): Minshan, Qinling, Qionglai, Liangshan, Daxiangling and Xiaoxiangling (in the provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu). The clime in these mountains is characterized by snow for 3-4 months annually, and by heavy rain summers, due to the monsoon. 239 giant pandas had lived in captivity in China, by the end of 2006.

Now, Chinese archaeologists have announced the finding of panda and ape (probably orangutan related) fossils dated 400,000 years old, in the Hainan Province, a tropical island in south China.

Most of the fossils consisted in teeth, and were first encountered in a quarry site, in June 2006, in Changjiang Li Autonomous County, by a team led by Huang Wanbo, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"The discovery proved that pandas and great apes lived in Hainan about 400,000 years ago and the island was then part of the Chinese mainland." said Huang.

The panda bears have been strictly connected to China, moving their territory linked to Ice Ages clime changes in the past 3 million years, following the bamboo areal movements, as the distribution of bamboo moved southward during the glaciations.

Also, in 2007, a team announced the discovery of the fossil skull of the earliest known bear from the panda genus (Ailuropoda) in southern China, embedded in the wall of a limestone cave in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The skull was 2-3 million years old and the species, Ailuropoda microta, appeared to be "pygmy" (half the size of the current species) and already adapted to the bamboo diet.

The new finding reveals that body size in the panda bear lineage has largely fluctuated. A more recent panda bear, living less than a million years ago, was bigger than the modern giant pandas.