May 31, 2012 • 20 mins
The mythical centaur represented man's dual nature -- and as one biologist points out, the creature would also need two hearts. In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss all things centaur, from the creature's symbolic meaning to its fictional anatomy.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Julie Douglas. Julie, have you seen any recent movies that
have centaurs? And no, I haven't, but you recently sent
(00:25):
out a rate photo of fifty center. Oh yes, well
that was online. Various individualsome to have a lot of
fun creating centaurs out of humans famous humans generally and horses.
But they have shown up in some movies, and the
Narnia movies had centers in that Harry Potter movies. Pierce
Bronson even hoofs it up in Percy Jackson and the
Lightning Thief, which is amusing to look at because it's
(00:46):
one of these cases where the centaur is wearing clothes
on its human part. It's just weird. Yeah, and then
the horses naked, of course, and you're like, why aren't
you even wearing a shirt? You know? In our films,
it's interesting because they use various elements of costume and
makeup and CG. I generally need to create these. A
centaur is an idea that is kind of monstrosity. In
the best of cases. But if you throw in kind
(01:07):
of shaky c g I or makeup, it looks even
weirder and a little more troubling to behold. Yeah, I
have to say that in the Narnia series that for
whatever reason, that Center drives me nuts, Like, not in
a good way anyway, it is. It's a fine line. Yeah.
I mean, they're ridiculous yet oddly perplexing, and in large
part because they do embody the dual nature of man,
(01:29):
this idea of the man and beast hybrid, you know,
much like the Saturday that we had mentioned before. It
represented the duplicity of man's be steel and pious nature.
So it's why you also find centaur's running around in
Dante's Inferno, thrusting centers back to their assigned depths in
boiling rivers of blood with spears um. Elsewhere in the
world of sculptures, you find them choking heroes and punching heroes.
(01:52):
They're always engaging in physical violence. With a few exceptions.
You do have some notable centaur teachers who are very
wise and want to help people, but a lot of
Center seemed to be perfectly happy, was just punching dudes
in the face. Yeah, it's funny because when you first
think of them, it's sort of like in the realm
of unicorns and they seem cute and you know, like
randier unicorns, half man, but they really are sort of
(02:13):
bloodthirsty folk. When you look at the tales of them.
You see them in various mythologies. Their most famous for
their role in Greek mythology, but you also find them
in India. The Gandharva's are are basically centaurs, and then
you find other cultural traditions that take new takes on
what a centauri is. For instance, according to Carol Rose,
historian has written a lot about monsters and symbolic meaning
(02:34):
of monsters, points out that centers often pop up in
European traditions to represent quote, the suffering of Christ as
the man and the revenge taken upon his betrayal, which
I find rather interesting and kind of hard to imagine.
And then you also find some interesting takes on centaurs
in sculpture. Versus, if you traveled to the Louver and
you see the old centaur there, which is this statue
(02:56):
of the centaur and his arms are bound behind his
back and upids riding on his back. There originally two
of these, you have the old centaur and the young centaur,
and the young center is free and in love, and
the old one has his arms bound by Cupid behind
his back. So there's this idea of his dual nature
of man and sort of the bestial urges that are
commanding the human portion of ourselves, and what the ramifications
(03:19):
of that might be in later years. Well, and we
wanted to focus on Center today because we thought, you know, what,
what if a centaur were to actually exist, what might
it look like physically? What sort of vital organs would
it have, much like when we talked about King Kong
or god Zilla. So we're gonna kind of take you
guys through this a little bit today, talk about not
(03:39):
just centaurs, but mythology, mistaking mythology for science, and you know,
in a historical context. And then we're gonna take a
look at our own bodies and try to figure out
why we are designed the way we are designed. Yeah,
first of all, we should stay just for the record, again,
there's no such thing as a center. They do not
exist as real creatures. As powerful as the idea maybe
(04:02):
and as interesting as the topic. Maybe there has never
existed a human horse hybrid creature. That doesn't mean that
people didn't try to convince us otherwise. Right, We've always
tried to make sense out of fossils that we find
a way bones are aligned in the earth, the ruminants
of bones, So it's not impossible that one might come
across the mixed bones of a human and a horse
(04:24):
or horse like creature and wonder, hey, I wonder one
of these are the same creature? How how might these
pieces fit together if I symble them wrong? And then
of course you have stories about the Spanish conquistadors arriving
on horseback in Central America and the native people thinking
at first that they were one creature composed of horse
and man. How to explain the first time someone rode
(04:46):
a horse? Right, and you see that cruising by, Yeah,
you might think, what so a lot of these fantastic
idea I mean, monsters, on one hand, are always symbols.
Monsters symbolize something. And so we've discussed a little, and
we'll continue to discuss a little about what a into
our means and what it represents about us. But then
also we create monsters in attempt to understand something or
(05:06):
to illustrate something that exists in the world, such as
people riding horses or strange ways that bones are turning
up in the earth. Yeah. The Fermbank Museum here in Atlanta,
I guess I was, but it was a year and
a half two years ago had an exhibit that actually
talked about these mythical creatures. And I did not see it, unfortunately,
but you did see it, right, nephew. Yeah, And so
(05:28):
they wanted to talk about with the public specimens and
fossils of prehistoric animals and try to investigate how they
could have, through misidentification, speculation, fear, or imagination, inspired the
development of some legendary creatures. They were talking about narwhal
tusks from the North Sea, which they think could have
given credence to this idea of the unicorn. Right, I mean,
(05:50):
if you've ever seen the narwhal tusk two, you can
actually see the way that it's spiraling upward, just like
you think of a unicorn. And how dinosaurs might have
been mistaken for griffin for instance, or undersea monsters like
giant squid could have become these Yeah, the cracking, these
crazy creatures that rose up with you in these hundred
(06:10):
foot waves. Hundred foot waves, true rug waves, but not
so much giant three headed octopus. That exhibit which I
believe there's a Smithsonian traveling exhibit. They also had a
Fiji mermaid, which which is a lot of fun, which
of course one of these side show carnival hybrid deals
where they would take the remnants of a monkey and
the remnants of a fish, sew them together and display
the mummified remains and it's it's frightening and horrifying and
(06:33):
wonderful and wonderful at the same time. You tend not
to see that kind of specimen with centaurs, because you're
talking of a horse is a big animal to deal with,
and even if you had a large enough monkey so
on to that body that you're still talking about a
lot of work to click, a lot of bones for
that one. But you do see some examples of people
combining the bones of a man in the bones of
a horse, specifically with an artistic result in mind. Yeah,
(06:56):
I attended the University of Tennessee and Knoxville some years
ago and they actually have an exhibit there in their library.
I assume it's still there. Perhaps any U t K.
Listeners out there can correct me on this if I'm wrong.
But they have this exhibit called the Center Excavations at Volos,
and it's made to look like the fossil remnants of
a cent our skeletal system. We've always kind of thought,
(07:17):
well in the description and the photo I saw, I mean,
it's really pretty mapped out so that it looks like
it is indeed the real thing. And it's tuned in
a case with a faux marble base and stimulated wood
panels at these skeletal remains of what they call a
centaur burial, along with inscribed clay tablets. And you see
(07:38):
there's a panel and it says it's one of three
Center burials discovered in nineteen eighty by the Archaeological Society
of Argos near Volos, Greece, and they include a map.
Would cut. I mean they make it look like, you know,
this is a real thing, and the idea is that
it supposed to be an object lesson on the importance
of skepticism. Yeah, right, like it just because something is
(08:01):
presented in a way that looks like it's got authority
doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, these bones are the
real thing. I think it's it's fascinating and of course,
as you said, it's meant as is artwork as well. Yeah,
I kind of wish it would have become more of
a heart for the university because the football team was
the Tennessee Volunteers, and I never really paid any attention
to the football, but but I might have had they
(08:21):
been the Tennessee Centaurs if that had been like the mascot. Yeah,
it's very possible, right, and then they should have taken
that whole heart, because I think that's an I wish
my university had had such an exhibit. But what if,
what if a center could be real? Well, we should
explore that after a fifth break. All right, we're back
(08:43):
the anatomy of the center. It's a fascinating thing to
think about, and we've discussed before. I love it when
someone with the scientific mind applies that scientific mind to
something ridiculous, not in an attempt to prove that ridiculous
thing true, but sort of has a thought experiment. So
we actually have an example of that. Year. There's a
wonderful paper that actually it published in the Annals of
(09:05):
Improbable Research. And these are the guys to do the
Ignoble Prizes every year, and just a little background on that.
They highlight real and legitimate scientific research that seems absurd. Generally,
these experiments or papers or studies that they highlight there's
generally something to them. It's not just complete nonsense, and
there's there's always science to it. A lot of these
(09:27):
scientific experiments are things that elected giggles from certain members.
I'm thinking about the scientists who a forty year study
of his own cracking of his knuckles proved to his
mother that it wasn't going to cause I don't know,
our fridays or something, as his mother had claimed years
and years. And that's a great example because on one hand,
(09:49):
question answered, mystery solved. This dude set out and using science,
using rigid system of evaluation take that mom, investigated his
mom's statement and proved it wrong, you know. So that's awesome.
But then in the other hand, it's a guy cracking
his knuckles and keeping track of it for this large
portion of his life and then publishing the results. So
(10:11):
a lot of stuff since the lineup like that. For instance,
there was the I think was the Las Vegas study
into the ovulation of strippers and how that affected their
tips like that was also a study that ignoble prizes
anson probably research fla that research, by the way, has
been questioned, yes, by the way recently, but a lot
of researches. But still it was a scientific inquiry. And
(10:34):
so we encounter a paper titled Anatomy of the Centaur.
And this is from a German anatomous by the name
of Reinhard. Do you have his full name? Yeah? HC.
Reinhard v Puts of Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University, Unique Institute
of Anatomy. Yeah. And he writes a paper where he
just sets out with this question in mind. All right,
so the centaur is not real, but what if it was.
(10:55):
If the center was real, how would it's an atomy work,
How would its circulatory so isom work? How would it
digest food? There are a number of anatomical problems that
emerge and trying to imagine how a centaur works. And
this guy decided to create an answer using actual science,
using everything you knew about human and equine anatomy to
combine those and create a probable centaur. Yep, you've got
(11:18):
a hybrid system. So you have to keep this in mind.
So centaur's heart, or we should say hearts right right,
the centaur's going to need two of them, primary and
secondary to pump blood. Through this mash up of bodies,
you're also getting into questions of well, how does it
digest food? All right, so the stomach would be in
the horse section, but it would need to have a
(11:38):
human stomach because the centaurs, according to most records, they're
not going around eating hay or anything. They're going around
eating human food, so they would have to have a
human gastro intestinal system. Well, and lots of libations too.
According to right big drinkers, they live large. And then
he also gives a certain amount of consideration to the
reproductive organs of the center pis. Yes, most depictions is
(12:02):
he discusses show no penis in the front of the center,
and most centers in art are are males. You'd see
no penis at the front of the center because that's
like the front of the horse. That's like the horses
sternum more or less. Right, So i'd be like a
penis on a sternum, right, So you tend not to
see it there, you tend to see it back in
the back. So where the horses actual reproductive organs would
(12:23):
be right. There was no definitive that like where the
placement is right. It just sort of makes sense that
it would be in the hind quarters, though you do
see a certain variety points out the cretion variety of center,
which you'll see in some like mid eighth century BC
Greek artwork, where you see a center that has more
human legs in the front and human genitalia in the front,
(12:44):
but then but then it's unknown if it also has
genitalia in the back. This is the problem when you
start start trying to imagine mythical, unreal things as real
anatomical creation. And now I'm just laughing that we're sitting
here discussing the penis placement on the center. Yeah. I
don't know how we got here, but we did. One
of the things we found most interesting was the idea
that Reinhart argues that it would need to hearts, that
(13:05):
you need the human heart and the horse heart both
achieving a certain synchronicity in order for this being to exist,
which led us to think, Okay, we've got two lungs,
two kidneys, two eyes, why don't we have two hearts?
Exactly yeah, why is there? Why is there just one
of these? Is? Okay, there's there's there's there's a really
good reason for this Record's University anthropologists Susan Cashell says
(13:26):
that the one heart to lung system began to emerge
about three hundred million years ago when animals first moved
from seed to land, and the idea is that this
one heart too lung system was an easy blueprint to
iterate as animals evolved into such divergent species as birds
and insects and humans. Um, So we all evolved to
(13:46):
have stomachs digest food, lungs to breathe air, kidneys to
filter waste, and this became the most efficient mold for
nearly all species to evolve here and live on earth.
That is why, my friend, And here's another thing. If
we were to have two hearts, it really wouldn't make
a difference because your body is a system that functions
(14:08):
at full capacity, so the addition of extra heart wouldn't
really do much. So it seems like a cool thing, like, hey, yeah,
why not have two hearts? It seems like that could
really get us to move faster, pump more blood to
our system, more oxygen to our brain. But that is
not actually what would happen. I ran across an excerpt
from a paper by a man by the name of
Nikolai Siniston. He was working at Gorky Medical Institute in Moscow,
(14:31):
and this is from and he says, for a number
of years my laboratory has been studying the problem of
transplating the heart of vertebrate animals in the animal kingdom.
Many necessary prerequisites exist for carrying out this important and
at first sight impossible operation. The first stage was my
work on cold blooded animals, frogs and fishes. After a
number of experimental variants and the perfection of the operation technique,
(14:53):
I succeeded in transplanting to a frog a second heart
taken from another animal. I planted the second heart in
the same area is the heart of the host. Animals
with two hearts show no difference from control frogs, and
experienced biologists invited to examine them were unable to distinguish
one from the other. Two hearted frogs went through the
usual nuptial period in spring and cast their spawn in
(15:15):
the ordinary way, which is a delightful way of saying.
Two hearted frogs also did it in the baby frogs
did it just fine. Yeah, And so they weren't able
to tell. Scientists looking at the frogs weren't able to tell.
So to your point, an animal with an extra heart
thrown into the mix is not going to be a
super frog or a super animal. It's gonna work out. Yeah.
You could actually do the same to a human if
(15:37):
you were to intervene in the embryonic stage. Because here's
the deal. During the embryonic stage of development, we actually
do have two hearts, and this is called the heart primordia,
which eventually fuses together into one heart with four chambers.
And we're also outfitted with two eyes during the embryonic stage,
although we begin with one primordia of the eye, which
(15:58):
eventually separates to formed do so if the primorny were
to be kept from splitting, we would have a cyclop side.
How crazy, awful and great is that. I think we
could also consiuerably engineer two hearts at that early stage exactly.
But I believe they have achieved that with frogs, Yes
they did. You could do it frogs, You could do
it with humans, but obviously this is not something you'd
(16:20):
want to do. But there is something called heterotopic heart
transplant that we should mention, Yes, we should, because it
has to do with a guy human who actually does
have two hearts. Earlier this year, an older man was
admitted to a hospital in Verona, Italy, and doctors were
amazed because they could detect two heartbeats, both of which
(16:40):
were displaying signs of dys rhythmia. And what they found
out is that this guy had undergone a procedure known
as heterotopic heart transplant, which we don't really do anymore
because technology has gotten to the point where it's not necessary.
But for a while, if you were going to transplant
an additional organ kidney, you wouldn't necessarily take the old
organ out right because it might be too difficult to extract,
(17:03):
or there was the hope that the organ might recover
while the new organ took over day to day functions. Right,
it's kind of like, oh, well, we don't want to
fire this person. Let's have them train their replacement for
a few for a week or so, and it works out,
we'll just keep them both. And that's what happened in
the chest of this Italian man. Yeah, yeah, that the
transplant team made it his new heart with his malfunctioning
(17:23):
old one, and the chambers and blood vessels of the
two hearts were married so that the new heart could
support the old one. The problem though, is that you
can develop two independent heart rhythms, especially in a scenario
where one heart gets a little bit better, and in
this guy's case, to just rhythmic problems led to him
actually flatlining. Fortunately, though, he was jolted back to life
(17:46):
with a defibrillator and his pacemaker was replaced. But it
did kind of put you know, doctors on alert to like, oh, yeah, hey,
there are some people walking around with two hearts from
this procedure. He would have a great excuse, I guess
if he was caught by his adi looking around, you know,
and he would say, hey, what can I do? I
got two hearts? You know, Hey, I got a lot
of hearts, got a lot of heart Yeah, something like that. Yeah,
(18:07):
I'm sure he would love that joke. Seriously. It's it's amazing, though,
I think there are individuals out there with two hearts
in their chest. It's possible conceivable at an early stage
to interfere in human development and create two hearts. So
even these things that would factor into the existence of
a mythical creature we can pinpoint in the anatomical world
at large, and also like the discovery, at least for me,
(18:29):
that we did have this primordia I that separated that.
If it didn't, you would have a cyclopsize. So centaurs.
There you go. That's just kind of a a quick
run through what they are and some of the science
tied up around them. One of the more thought provoking
ideas I ran across. I discovered it through some of
the writings of author and theorist Ken Wilbur who was
drawing from the works of Hubert Benoir, Jane Alexander, and
(18:50):
Eric Erickson, and they used the centaur to describe the
integrated state of mind and body. So the idea here is,
especially modern humans, we tend to think of ourselves in
our body, our brain in our body as a rider
on a horse. We are the rider, our body is
the horse, and inevitably our horse ends up failing us.
It's not going as fast as we wanted to go.
(19:12):
It's got a bum legs trying to buck us. You know,
it's up, so we're whipping it. We have this relationship
where we're the mind, the body is a horse, and
we kind of treat the horse like this thing that
is subservient to us, where in reality, the state is
more like a centaur. It is an integrated state. So
we've discussed before we're not just a brain, and we
talked about the way our diet and the way whatever
(19:33):
is going on in our digestic system, how that influences
our state of being. Where this integrated being, where this
centaur when it comes to the mind body relationship, and
that's definitely the more healthy and the more accurate way
of looking at the relationships. So if your horsey parts
aren't happy, you're not happy, Yes, exactly, speak because you
are your horsey parts. That's that's that's the one takeaway
(19:55):
from this this episode. So there you have it. Centaurs.
If you would like to share your lots on centaur's,
your favorite centaurs from fact or fantasy, let us know
about them. You can find us on Facebook where we
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and you can always drop us a line at blow
(20:15):
the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Julie Douglas. Julie, have you seen any recent movies that
have centaurs? And no, I haven't, but you recently sent
(00:25):
out a rate photo of fifty center. Oh yes, well
that was online. Various individualsome to have a lot of
fun creating centaurs out of humans famous humans generally and horses.
But they have shown up in some movies, and the
Narnia movies had centers in that Harry Potter movies. Pierce
Bronson even hoofs it up in Percy Jackson and the
Lightning Thief, which is amusing to look at because it's
(00:46):
one of these cases where the centaur is wearing clothes
on its human part. It's just weird. Yeah, and then
the horses naked, of course, and you're like, why aren't
you even wearing a shirt? You know? In our films,
it's interesting because they use various elements of costume and
makeup and CG. I generally need to create these. A
centaur is an idea that is kind of monstrosity. In
the best of cases. But if you throw in kind
(01:07):
of shaky c g I or makeup, it looks even
weirder and a little more troubling to behold. Yeah, I
have to say that in the Narnia series that for
whatever reason, that Center drives me nuts, Like, not in
a good way anyway, it is. It's a fine line. Yeah.
I mean, they're ridiculous yet oddly perplexing, and in large
part because they do embody the dual nature of man,
(01:29):
this idea of the man and beast hybrid, you know,
much like the Saturday that we had mentioned before. It
represented the duplicity of man's be steel and pious nature.
So it's why you also find centaur's running around in
Dante's Inferno, thrusting centers back to their assigned depths in
boiling rivers of blood with spears um. Elsewhere in the
world of sculptures, you find them choking heroes and punching heroes.
(01:52):
They're always engaging in physical violence. With a few exceptions.
You do have some notable centaur teachers who are very
wise and want to help people, but a lot of
Center seemed to be perfectly happy, was just punching dudes
in the face. Yeah, it's funny because when you first
think of them, it's sort of like in the realm
of unicorns and they seem cute and you know, like
randier unicorns, half man, but they really are sort of
(02:13):
bloodthirsty folk. When you look at the tales of them.
You see them in various mythologies. Their most famous for
their role in Greek mythology, but you also find them
in India. The Gandharva's are are basically centaurs, and then
you find other cultural traditions that take new takes on
what a centauri is. For instance, according to Carol Rose,
historian has written a lot about monsters and symbolic meaning
(02:34):
of monsters, points out that centers often pop up in
European traditions to represent quote, the suffering of Christ as
the man and the revenge taken upon his betrayal, which
I find rather interesting and kind of hard to imagine.
And then you also find some interesting takes on centaurs
in sculpture. Versus, if you traveled to the Louver and
you see the old centaur there, which is this statue
(02:56):
of the centaur and his arms are bound behind his
back and upids riding on his back. There originally two
of these, you have the old centaur and the young centaur,
and the young center is free and in love, and
the old one has his arms bound by Cupid behind
his back. So there's this idea of his dual nature
of man and sort of the bestial urges that are
commanding the human portion of ourselves, and what the ramifications
(03:19):
of that might be in later years. Well, and we
wanted to focus on Center today because we thought, you know, what,
what if a centaur were to actually exist, what might
it look like physically? What sort of vital organs would
it have, much like when we talked about King Kong
or god Zilla. So we're gonna kind of take you
guys through this a little bit today, talk about not
(03:39):
just centaurs, but mythology, mistaking mythology for science, and you know,
in a historical context. And then we're gonna take a
look at our own bodies and try to figure out
why we are designed the way we are designed. Yeah,
first of all, we should stay just for the record, again,
there's no such thing as a center. They do not
exist as real creatures. As powerful as the idea maybe
(04:02):
and as interesting as the topic. Maybe there has never
existed a human horse hybrid creature. That doesn't mean that
people didn't try to convince us otherwise. Right, We've always
tried to make sense out of fossils that we find
a way bones are aligned in the earth, the ruminants
of bones, So it's not impossible that one might come
across the mixed bones of a human and a horse
(04:24):
or horse like creature and wonder, hey, I wonder one
of these are the same creature? How how might these
pieces fit together if I symble them wrong? And then
of course you have stories about the Spanish conquistadors arriving
on horseback in Central America and the native people thinking
at first that they were one creature composed of horse
and man. How to explain the first time someone rode
(04:46):
a horse? Right, and you see that cruising by, Yeah,
you might think, what so a lot of these fantastic
idea I mean, monsters, on one hand, are always symbols.
Monsters symbolize something. And so we've discussed a little, and
we'll continue to discuss a little about what a into
our means and what it represents about us. But then
also we create monsters in attempt to understand something or
(05:06):
to illustrate something that exists in the world, such as
people riding horses or strange ways that bones are turning
up in the earth. Yeah. The Fermbank Museum here in Atlanta,
I guess I was, but it was a year and
a half two years ago had an exhibit that actually
talked about these mythical creatures. And I did not see it, unfortunately,
but you did see it, right, nephew. Yeah, And so
(05:28):
they wanted to talk about with the public specimens and
fossils of prehistoric animals and try to investigate how they
could have, through misidentification, speculation, fear, or imagination, inspired the
development of some legendary creatures. They were talking about narwhal
tusks from the North Sea, which they think could have
given credence to this idea of the unicorn. Right, I mean,
(05:50):
if you've ever seen the narwhal tusk two, you can
actually see the way that it's spiraling upward, just like
you think of a unicorn. And how dinosaurs might have
been mistaken for griffin for instance, or undersea monsters like
giant squid could have become these Yeah, the cracking, these
crazy creatures that rose up with you in these hundred
(06:10):
foot waves. Hundred foot waves, true rug waves, but not
so much giant three headed octopus. That exhibit which I
believe there's a Smithsonian traveling exhibit. They also had a
Fiji mermaid, which which is a lot of fun, which
of course one of these side show carnival hybrid deals
where they would take the remnants of a monkey and
the remnants of a fish, sew them together and display
the mummified remains and it's it's frightening and horrifying and
(06:33):
wonderful and wonderful at the same time. You tend not
to see that kind of specimen with centaurs, because you're
talking of a horse is a big animal to deal with,
and even if you had a large enough monkey so
on to that body that you're still talking about a
lot of work to click, a lot of bones for
that one. But you do see some examples of people
combining the bones of a man in the bones of
a horse, specifically with an artistic result in mind. Yeah,
(06:56):
I attended the University of Tennessee and Knoxville some years
ago and they actually have an exhibit there in their library.
I assume it's still there. Perhaps any U t K.
Listeners out there can correct me on this if I'm wrong.
But they have this exhibit called the Center Excavations at Volos,
and it's made to look like the fossil remnants of
a cent our skeletal system. We've always kind of thought,
(07:17):
well in the description and the photo I saw, I mean,
it's really pretty mapped out so that it looks like
it is indeed the real thing. And it's tuned in
a case with a faux marble base and stimulated wood
panels at these skeletal remains of what they call a
centaur burial, along with inscribed clay tablets. And you see
(07:38):
there's a panel and it says it's one of three
Center burials discovered in nineteen eighty by the Archaeological Society
of Argos near Volos, Greece, and they include a map.
Would cut. I mean they make it look like, you know,
this is a real thing, and the idea is that
it supposed to be an object lesson on the importance
of skepticism. Yeah, right, like it just because something is
(08:01):
presented in a way that looks like it's got authority
doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, these bones are the
real thing. I think it's it's fascinating and of course,
as you said, it's meant as is artwork as well. Yeah,
I kind of wish it would have become more of
a heart for the university because the football team was
the Tennessee Volunteers, and I never really paid any attention
to the football, but but I might have had they
(08:21):
been the Tennessee Centaurs if that had been like the mascot. Yeah,
it's very possible, right, and then they should have taken
that whole heart, because I think that's an I wish
my university had had such an exhibit. But what if,
what if a center could be real? Well, we should
explore that after a fifth break. All right, we're back
(08:43):
the anatomy of the center. It's a fascinating thing to
think about, and we've discussed before. I love it when
someone with the scientific mind applies that scientific mind to
something ridiculous, not in an attempt to prove that ridiculous
thing true, but sort of has a thought experiment. So
we actually have an example of that. Year. There's a
wonderful paper that actually it published in the Annals of
(09:05):
Improbable Research. And these are the guys to do the
Ignoble Prizes every year, and just a little background on that.
They highlight real and legitimate scientific research that seems absurd. Generally,
these experiments or papers or studies that they highlight there's
generally something to them. It's not just complete nonsense, and
there's there's always science to it. A lot of these
(09:27):
scientific experiments are things that elected giggles from certain members.
I'm thinking about the scientists who a forty year study
of his own cracking of his knuckles proved to his
mother that it wasn't going to cause I don't know,
our fridays or something, as his mother had claimed years
and years. And that's a great example because on one hand,
(09:49):
question answered, mystery solved. This dude set out and using science,
using rigid system of evaluation take that mom, investigated his
mom's statement and proved it wrong, you know. So that's awesome.
But then in the other hand, it's a guy cracking
his knuckles and keeping track of it for this large
portion of his life and then publishing the results. So
(10:11):
a lot of stuff since the lineup like that. For instance,
there was the I think was the Las Vegas study
into the ovulation of strippers and how that affected their
tips like that was also a study that ignoble prizes
anson probably research fla that research, by the way, has
been questioned, yes, by the way recently, but a lot
of researches. But still it was a scientific inquiry. And
(10:34):
so we encounter a paper titled Anatomy of the Centaur.
And this is from a German anatomous by the name
of Reinhard. Do you have his full name? Yeah? HC.
Reinhard v Puts of Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University, Unique Institute
of Anatomy. Yeah. And he writes a paper where he
just sets out with this question in mind. All right,
so the centaur is not real, but what if it was.
(10:55):
If the center was real, how would it's an atomy work,
How would its circulatory so isom work? How would it
digest food? There are a number of anatomical problems that
emerge and trying to imagine how a centaur works. And
this guy decided to create an answer using actual science,
using everything you knew about human and equine anatomy to
combine those and create a probable centaur. Yep, you've got
(11:18):
a hybrid system. So you have to keep this in mind.
So centaur's heart, or we should say hearts right right,
the centaur's going to need two of them, primary and
secondary to pump blood. Through this mash up of bodies,
you're also getting into questions of well, how does it
digest food? All right, so the stomach would be in
the horse section, but it would need to have a
(11:38):
human stomach because the centaurs, according to most records, they're
not going around eating hay or anything. They're going around
eating human food, so they would have to have a
human gastro intestinal system. Well, and lots of libations too.
According to right big drinkers, they live large. And then
he also gives a certain amount of consideration to the
reproductive organs of the center pis. Yes, most depictions is
(12:02):
he discusses show no penis in the front of the center,
and most centers in art are are males. You'd see
no penis at the front of the center because that's
like the front of the horse. That's like the horses
sternum more or less. Right, So i'd be like a
penis on a sternum, right, So you tend not to
see it there, you tend to see it back in
the back. So where the horses actual reproductive organs would
(12:23):
be right. There was no definitive that like where the
placement is right. It just sort of makes sense that
it would be in the hind quarters, though you do
see a certain variety points out the cretion variety of center,
which you'll see in some like mid eighth century BC
Greek artwork, where you see a center that has more
human legs in the front and human genitalia in the front,
(12:44):
but then but then it's unknown if it also has
genitalia in the back. This is the problem when you
start start trying to imagine mythical, unreal things as real
anatomical creation. And now I'm just laughing that we're sitting
here discussing the penis placement on the center. Yeah. I
don't know how we got here, but we did. One
of the things we found most interesting was the idea
that Reinhart argues that it would need to hearts, that
(13:05):
you need the human heart and the horse heart both
achieving a certain synchronicity in order for this being to exist,
which led us to think, Okay, we've got two lungs,
two kidneys, two eyes, why don't we have two hearts?
Exactly yeah, why is there? Why is there just one
of these? Is? Okay, there's there's there's there's a really
good reason for this Record's University anthropologists Susan Cashell says
(13:26):
that the one heart to lung system began to emerge
about three hundred million years ago when animals first moved
from seed to land, and the idea is that this
one heart too lung system was an easy blueprint to
iterate as animals evolved into such divergent species as birds
and insects and humans. Um, So we all evolved to
(13:46):
have stomachs digest food, lungs to breathe air, kidneys to
filter waste, and this became the most efficient mold for
nearly all species to evolve here and live on earth.
That is why, my friend, And here's another thing. If
we were to have two hearts, it really wouldn't make
a difference because your body is a system that functions
(14:08):
at full capacity, so the addition of extra heart wouldn't
really do much. So it seems like a cool thing, like, hey, yeah,
why not have two hearts? It seems like that could
really get us to move faster, pump more blood to
our system, more oxygen to our brain. But that is
not actually what would happen. I ran across an excerpt
from a paper by a man by the name of
Nikolai Siniston. He was working at Gorky Medical Institute in Moscow,
(14:31):
and this is from and he says, for a number
of years my laboratory has been studying the problem of
transplating the heart of vertebrate animals in the animal kingdom.
Many necessary prerequisites exist for carrying out this important and
at first sight impossible operation. The first stage was my
work on cold blooded animals, frogs and fishes. After a
number of experimental variants and the perfection of the operation technique,
(14:53):
I succeeded in transplanting to a frog a second heart
taken from another animal. I planted the second heart in
the same area is the heart of the host. Animals
with two hearts show no difference from control frogs, and
experienced biologists invited to examine them were unable to distinguish
one from the other. Two hearted frogs went through the
usual nuptial period in spring and cast their spawn in
(15:15):
the ordinary way, which is a delightful way of saying.
Two hearted frogs also did it in the baby frogs
did it just fine. Yeah, And so they weren't able
to tell. Scientists looking at the frogs weren't able to tell.
So to your point, an animal with an extra heart
thrown into the mix is not going to be a
super frog or a super animal. It's gonna work out. Yeah.
You could actually do the same to a human if
(15:37):
you were to intervene in the embryonic stage. Because here's
the deal. During the embryonic stage of development, we actually
do have two hearts, and this is called the heart primordia,
which eventually fuses together into one heart with four chambers.
And we're also outfitted with two eyes during the embryonic stage,
although we begin with one primordia of the eye, which
(15:58):
eventually separates to formed do so if the primorny were
to be kept from splitting, we would have a cyclop side.
How crazy, awful and great is that. I think we
could also consiuerably engineer two hearts at that early stage exactly.
But I believe they have achieved that with frogs, Yes
they did. You could do it frogs, You could do
it with humans, but obviously this is not something you'd
(16:20):
want to do. But there is something called heterotopic heart
transplant that we should mention, Yes, we should, because it
has to do with a guy human who actually does
have two hearts. Earlier this year, an older man was
admitted to a hospital in Verona, Italy, and doctors were
amazed because they could detect two heartbeats, both of which
(16:40):
were displaying signs of dys rhythmia. And what they found
out is that this guy had undergone a procedure known
as heterotopic heart transplant, which we don't really do anymore
because technology has gotten to the point where it's not necessary.
But for a while, if you were going to transplant
an additional organ kidney, you wouldn't necessarily take the old
organ out right because it might be too difficult to extract,
(17:03):
or there was the hope that the organ might recover
while the new organ took over day to day functions. Right,
it's kind of like, oh, well, we don't want to
fire this person. Let's have them train their replacement for
a few for a week or so, and it works out,
we'll just keep them both. And that's what happened in
the chest of this Italian man. Yeah, yeah, that the
transplant team made it his new heart with his malfunctioning
(17:23):
old one, and the chambers and blood vessels of the
two hearts were married so that the new heart could
support the old one. The problem though, is that you
can develop two independent heart rhythms, especially in a scenario
where one heart gets a little bit better, and in
this guy's case, to just rhythmic problems led to him
actually flatlining. Fortunately, though, he was jolted back to life
(17:46):
with a defibrillator and his pacemaker was replaced. But it
did kind of put you know, doctors on alert to like, oh, yeah, hey,
there are some people walking around with two hearts from
this procedure. He would have a great excuse, I guess
if he was caught by his adi looking around, you know,
and he would say, hey, what can I do? I
got two hearts? You know, Hey, I got a lot
of hearts, got a lot of heart Yeah, something like that. Yeah,
(18:07):
I'm sure he would love that joke. Seriously. It's it's amazing, though,
I think there are individuals out there with two hearts
in their chest. It's possible conceivable at an early stage
to interfere in human development and create two hearts. So
even these things that would factor into the existence of
a mythical creature we can pinpoint in the anatomical world
at large, and also like the discovery, at least for me,
(18:29):
that we did have this primordia I that separated that.
If it didn't, you would have a cyclopsize. So centaurs.
There you go. That's just kind of a a quick
run through what they are and some of the science
tied up around them. One of the more thought provoking
ideas I ran across. I discovered it through some of
the writings of author and theorist Ken Wilbur who was
drawing from the works of Hubert Benoir, Jane Alexander, and
(18:50):
Eric Erickson, and they used the centaur to describe the
integrated state of mind and body. So the idea here is,
especially modern humans, we tend to think of ourselves in
our body, our brain in our body as a rider
on a horse. We are the rider, our body is
the horse, and inevitably our horse ends up failing us.
It's not going as fast as we wanted to go.
(19:12):
It's got a bum legs trying to buck us. You know,
it's up, so we're whipping it. We have this relationship
where we're the mind, the body is a horse, and
we kind of treat the horse like this thing that
is subservient to us, where in reality, the state is
more like a centaur. It is an integrated state. So
we've discussed before we're not just a brain, and we
talked about the way our diet and the way whatever
(19:33):
is going on in our digestic system, how that influences
our state of being. Where this integrated being, where this
centaur when it comes to the mind body relationship, and
that's definitely the more healthy and the more accurate way
of looking at the relationships. So if your horsey parts
aren't happy, you're not happy, Yes, exactly, speak because you
are your horsey parts. That's that's that's the one takeaway
(19:55):
from this this episode. So there you have it. Centaurs.
If you would like to share your lots on centaur's,
your favorite centaurs from fact or fantasy, let us know
about them. You can find us on Facebook where we
are stuff to blow your mind, or you can find
us on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind
and you can share any of that stuff with us there,
and you can always drop us a line at blow
(20:15):
the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
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