Archeologists have discovered rock paintings depicting strange creatures and called them teriantrops, hybrids of humans and animals. Researchers believe that ancient artists made the painting from life.
Paul Takon from the Australian Museum in Sydney and anthropologist Christopher Chippendale from the University of Cambridge say that such hybrids, including centaurs, were highly likely living side by side with primitives. In Australia and South Africa, the researchers discovered dozens of rock paintings showing animals with human heads and humans with animal heads that may be over 32 thousand years old.

They have had the first in history detailed study of the strange drawings. The study covered about 5,000 rock paintings of our ancestors; the researchers systematized the frequency and the types of depicted teriantrops and determined their ages. They arrived at a conclusion that animal men actually existed in the remote past. They believe that primitives could hardly draw what they never saw.

Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome also tell us about animal men, and centaurs are the most frequent ones. These are creatures with the human torso transforming into the feet of a horse or some other animal, a bull, a donkey, a sheep and even a goat. The word centaur is a compound of KEN (kenw) meaning "I kill" and TAUROS meaning "bull", and it reveals astronomic knowledge of our ancestors. When the constellation of Sagittarius (Centaurus throwing a spear) appears in the night skies, we can no longer see Taurus, one of the Sun symbols.

The anciet legends say that centaurs came down from the Greek mountains where they failed to keep up friendly relations with the local population. As far as some centaurs loved drinking wine, they easily flew into a rage and conflicted with people.

Mythology expert, Candidate of historical sciences Alexander Guryev says that animal men were the result of buggery, sex contacts between men and animals, which were quite typical of the ancient epochs. The expert adds that many people believed that they descended from animals: Tibetans believed they descended from monkeys, Hindu believed that horses were their ancestors and people in Thailand thought they descended from the dog.

Some ancient legends are absolutely strange indeed. There is an old Greek myth saying that great conqueror Alexander the Great was conceived after a contact with a grass-snake, into whom Zeus, the patron of all gods and humans, turned with the view to seduce Olympia, the daughter of Macedonian king.