By Emmanuel Oluwadola

Claim: Multiple Facebook accounts claimed that a half-human and half-horse skeleton was discovered in Greece in 1876.

Verdict: False! No such discovery exists in historical records. Analysis showed that the merged image, which depicted a female centaur and a centaur skeleton, was manipulated.

Full Text

Centaurs are mythical creatures with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse. They are well-known figures from ancient Greek mythology. They often appeared in Greek sculpture, pottery, and later literature. One of the most famous centaurs, Chiron, is associated with wisdom and healing and has been referenced in various works of modern fantasy, including the Harry Potter series.

Recently, a Facebook page, Archaeology Revealed, on May 8, 2025, claimed that the skeleton of a centaur was discovered in Greece in 1876.

The post reads, “Greece: The Astonishing Discovery of A Half-Human, Half-Horse Skeleton in 1876”.

An image showing a female centaur alongside a supposed centaur skeleton was shared with the claim. As of May 28, 2025, the post had received over 6,800 likes, 883 comments, and 434 shares.

The post can also be found on some other Facebook accounts here, here, here and here. 

Given the claim’s virality and the potential to mislead the public about historical and archaeological facts, we conducted this fact-check.

Verification

To verify the claim, we used DUBAWA’s fact-checking Chatbot on WhatsApp. The verdict from the chatbot reads, ‘‘The statement is false. No half-human, half-horse skeleton was discovered in Greece in 1876. No such finding exists in historical records.’’

Using a keyword search on Google, we also found that centaurs have never existed; they are mythical beings first described in Greek mythology thousands of years ago.

We used InVid to analyse the images shown in the claim. The results showed that the images (centaur and the skeleton) were altered.

Screenshots of the image analysis on InVid, showing the traces of alterations 

The wavelet analysis in the traces filter on InVid indicated that the images were manipulated. 

We further traced the origin of the manipulated images using Google reverse image search. The results revealed that the image of the lady attached to the horse is that of Tamannaah Bhatia, an Indian actress. We traced the attached image to a 2017 Indian movie titled ‘Baahubali’ where Bhatia (named Avantika) played the role of a skilled female warrior. Evidence of this can be found on the Times of India and Pinterest.

The original image of the manipulated horse can be found here and here.

We also found the original horse skeleton using a Google reverse image search. The exact skeleton was traced to a French discussion forum, called Francefurs. 

The image of the horse skeleton, with the caption ‘Chevaux’, which translates to ‘Horse’, was found in a post by Bongawonga dating back to 2006, tagged “The animal photo reference site”.

Conclusion

The claim that a centaur was discovered in Greece in 1876 is false. There is no historical record of such a discovery. Our investigation revealed that the images attached to the claim were manipulated.