Cowpokes and Centaurs.

In American English, 'cowpoke' is a familiar nickname for a cowboy (a real cowboy is a man who handles cattle out on the range as a profession, or at least, someone who would like to (someone like me, who spent some very formative years in Elko, Nevada)).

Now. Someone tell me I'm wrong. But, looking in the IE-index of the American Heritage Dictionary, I see *kent, 'jab', 'poke'. 'Taurus' of course means 'bull'. The Greeks portrayed the centaurs as horse-men, not bull-men.

The identification of of 'centaurs' as 'riders' is an old one. The Aztecs are reported to have spoken of conjunct creatures resembling centaurs, upon seeing the Spanish invaders. The Greeks no doubt did the same thing.

The fact that the Greeks gaves us centaurs suggests they were a mixed people, remembering their ancestral IE-myths as much as they remembered the horror of first seeing a cowboy running yahoo-wild through their Bronze-Age village.

Allowing for the semantic change of 'cow' to mean 'any of the species Bos taurus', 'cowpoke' perfectly translates 'centaur'.