Centaurs really existed, scientists say. And this is confirmed by rock art of the Stone Age with images of strange creatures. Archaeologists called them therianthropes - hybrids of humans and animals. And they believe that ancient artists painted from life.
Neighbors in mind
“At the dawn of civilization, hybrids, including centaurs, could well have lived next to primitive people. And even to be a kind of "neighbors in mind" - this is the opinion of rock art specialists Paul Tacon of the Australian Museum in Sydney and anthropologist of the University of Cambridge Christopher Chiplin-dale. In Australia and South Africa, they not only found dozens of images of people with animal heads and, conversely, animals with human heads that are more than 32,000 years old, but also conducted the world's first detailed study of strange drawings.
Having studied almost 5,000 works of stone art of our ancestors, scientists systematized the frequency of appearance and types of the depicted therianthropes, and also determined their age. And they came to the conclusion: in the distant past, beastmen really existed. After all, primitive man could not depict what he himself did not see.
They loved to drink
More modern stories from the myths of Ancient Greece and Rome also abound in beastmen. And centaurs are most often mentioned. These are creatures with a human torso that passes into the lower part of a horse or other animal, for example, a bull, donkey, ram, and even a goat. The word “centaur” itself is also compound: KEN (from “knew”) - “I kill” and TAUROS - “bull.” According to ancient legends, centaurs came from the mountains of Greece, where their relationship with the locals was rather difficult. centaurs were partial to wine, then they quickly fell into a rage and fought with people more than once.
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The shepherds are to blame
Where could the beastmen come from? In ancient times, sodomy - an intimate relationship between people and animals - was considered commonplace. Many peoples even believed they were descended from animals. For example, the Tibetans considered a monkey to be their ancestor, the Hindus - a horse, the inhabitants of Thailand - a dog.
There are also very strange legends. So, one ancient Greek myth tells that the future great conqueror Alexander the Great was conceived … from the snake, into which the god Zeus, the ruler of all gods and people, turned into. So he decided to seduce the daughter of the King of Macedonia, Olympia.
In general, the ancient Greeks and Romans, according to historical sources, could not live without sodomy. The Greek scientist Thales, according to legend, advised his master Periander not to trust sheep to unmarried shepherds if he wanted to avoid the birth of centaurs. The Roman poet-satirist Juvenal wrote that "Roman women often bared their buttocks in front of donkeys, luring them into sexual intercourse." In Egypt, such ties were part of a fertility cult ceremony.
Warriors and sheep
It turns out that not even a single battle in those days was complete without a herd of small ruminants - sheep or goats. These uncomplaining animals served the warriors not only as food, but also as objects of love. There is not-so-old written evidence of how Italian soldiers in 1562, during the siege of Lyon by the Catholics, deserted in droves due to the lack of sheep to satisfy their passion! Therefore, the generals of the Spanish king Philip II, who fought with Holland, took care of a sufficient number of goats and sheep for the army.
Satisfying soldiers with the help of animals was considered a lesser evil than using the services of prostitutes. Serious scientists - Paracelsus, Karda-no, the famous Italian obstetrician of the 16th century Lyceti - several times recorded cases of the birth of human children by animals and women - animals or hybrids. This list includes horses, elephants, dogs and even lions.
Devilish crossbreeding
But is it really possible to cross a person and an animal? Previously, science completely denied this possibility. But recently, reports about the experiments of geneticists began to appear in serious specialized publications. In test tubes, they managed to obtain so-called chimeras - embryos in which some of the cells were human, and some of the animal cells were mouse, sheep, monkey … From the point of view of genetics, by the way, we are not very different from these animals, by some few percent. And it is possible that in rare cases spontaneous mutations are possible, as a result of which direct crossing is not excluded - naturally through sexual intercourse. And who knows, maybe people with such mutations have lived at all times?
The famous Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin wrote that he himself saw a woman who, after intercourse with a cat, gave birth to a child with a cat's head. Examples of the birth of animal people can be found in some medical books of the 19th - 20th centuries. For example, the famous theologian Setler in 1940 argued that freaks can be the result of the sexual union of man and beast.
At the end of the last century, some British researchers described cases of cohabitation of black women with gorillas. Their children did simple housework and could even speak. But scientists did not manage to see these half-humans, half-gorillas, because the hybrids, feeling offended, left forever in the jungle.
As of today, archaeologists do not have whole skeletons, but they are complete in parts: separately lower, separately upper ones. Scientists hope they will be able to prove the existence of centaurs using new archaeological finds.
Academician B. V. Rauschenbach