Beast Men

Aside from every other kind of danger that Greeks of Homer's heroic age had to face in his "Iliad", there was the problem of "beast men" living in the mountains:

"...Yet be persuaded. Both of you are younger than I am. Yes, and in my time I have dealt with better men than you are, and never once did they disregard me. Never yet have I seen nor shall see again such men as these were, men like Peirithoös, and Dryas, shepherd of the people, Kaineus and Exadios, godlike Polyphemos, or Theseus, Aigeus' son, in the likeness of the immortals. These were the strongest generation of earth-born mortals, the strongest, and they fought against the strongest, THE BEASTG MEN LIVING WITHIN THE MOUNTAINS, and terribly they destroyed them. I was of the company of these men, coming from Pylos, a long way from a distant land, since they had summoned me. And I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one of the mortals now alive upon earth could do battle..."

Modern analysts trying to figure out what Homer might have meant by that assume he was talking about centaurs.

But there are two problems with that:

• The passage does not describe any sort of equine characteristics of those 'beast men', and
• Horses do not live in mountains. They are not adapted for it , which is why Athenians and others trusted human runners like Phillipedus to take messages through mountain passes to other cities, but did not trust mounted couriers to carry such messages. Horses are designed for open steppeland, not mountains.

There is a very much more interesting and compelling possibility concerning what Homer might have meant by 'beast men', living in the mountains.

Danny Vendramini's Challenge to Anthropologists

The Vendramini Neanderthal Reconstructions

DNA analyses and a sober interpretation of fossil evidence indicate that the Neanderthal was a very advanced bipedal ape with huge dark-world eyes like we observe in lemurs, tarsiers, and other leftovers from that age, and the same kind of six to eight inch fur coat as every other ice age creature had. He was not a slightly different human or some kind of a poster child for a kum-bi-ya pseudo-religion as most images show. His DNA is a bit closer to that of a chimpanzee than it is to ours.

Neanderthals are thought to have gone extinct around 30,000 years ago, but they were spread out over an immense land area. Is it really that difficult to believe that small groups might have survived here and there until historical times?

Vendramini's images indicate that Homer's sources would not have needed the world's best imaginations to refer to any such leftover Neanderthals as "beast men"...