Centaurs really existed - creatures with a human torso, smoothly turning into a horse's torso. Such creatures are known not only in ancient Greek mythology. Here are some interesting facts to support this.
“The Kekchi Mayans in the Alta Vera Paz region (Guatemala) talk about the“keks”. Kek (in the Kekchi Mayan dialect - "black") is said to be a centaur-like creature that guards the house of its master at night and frightens people (strangers) at dusk. Black, ugly, hairy. He is half human, with human hands and horse hooves "(The Daily Mail, London, 17 July 1963).
This means that centaurs were also in Latin America, that is, they are not a monopoly of ancient Greek mythology and were distributed on the continents that were not connected with human communications at that time. At the same time, centaurs, obviously, coexisted not only with "gods", but also with ordinary people, guarding their homes.
If you analyze the Greek stories about centaurs, you can see a certain pattern - they are spoken of as completely ordinary creatures such as cats and dogs, they fight, make peace with them, make friends … Frescoes from the life of centaurs abound in purely everyday, completely everyday details. In general, initially they do not look like fairy-tale characters such as Kolobok and Baba Yaga.
Truly fairy-tale characters are positioned in a completely different way. For example, some "reverse centaurs" - mythological hippoandros, ie. creatures with a human body and a horse's head. They are initially considered in myths and fairy tales precisely as invented.
Recently the existence of centaurs has been confirmed archaeologically!
In 1990, during archaeological excavations near El Eyyum in Western Sahara, more than a dozen skeletons of centaurs were discovered, many of which are quite well preserved. A professor at the California Institute of Natural Sciences J. R. R. Eppstein, having studied them, said that there was no talk of falsification. By the method of Professor Gerasimov, the appearance of the centaur was restored.
According to Professor Howard Dickerson, who studied this find, the size of the centaur is by no means gigantic: at the withers - about one meter, from the front hooves to the crown - about one meter eighty. The brain volume is slightly less than that of humans, but more than that of chimpanzees and gorillas.
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Of great interest among researchers was the question of how the internal organs were located in two cavities. It turned out that the entire upper-anterior (humanoid) part was filled with respiratory organs. Powerful lungs with large bronchi made the centaurs unusually hardy, in addition, obviously, the centaurs were very loud, and therefore deaf.
In the lower-posterior part, just behind the middle girdle of the limbs, guarded by the clavicles and shoulder blades, was a huge heart. Behind the heart is a voluminous stomach and long intestines, which indicates that the centaurs ate mostly grass.
On the sides, near the ribs, the centaurs had air bubbles similar to those of birds. During inhalation, they were filled with air, so that later, during exhalation, they filled the lungs with this air. Thus, centaurs were the only mammals with double breathing.
As historians believe, gradually centaurs from the territory of Greece, Asia Minor and the Balkans, where they were predominantly widespread, were driven by people to North Africa, where they gradually became extinct. The last mentions of centaurs in the Sahara are found in Capaglia's treatise "Travels to distant shores" (15th century AD)
The legends of the North American Indians about a certain mysterious people of the Haw-Musuvs, who live underground in the vast voids near California and Texas, look quite a mystery. These are some humanoid creatures the size of a small dog, which sometimes, about their business, enter from the ground and move through the air in some "silver canoes".
It would be possible to write off these stories for pure fantasy, if not for the description of the weapon of the Khav-Musuvs: a bundle of transparent tubes that cause a "shot" feeling of "rain from cactus needles" followed by numbness of the limbs. Do what you want, if this is not a primitive description of the effect of an electric shock.