The myth of the Noble Savage revealed

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4413954/Girls-slashed-beautiful-Ethiopian-scar-ceremony.html


While such horrors as above were practised all the time in palaeo times, they actually all seem to have had a positive purpose behind them. That is, successfully undergoing such rites of manhood/womanhood at puberty onwards meant that tribespeople would feel a much greater identification with their own tribe, because they felt that they had earned the right to become adults.More importantly for the tribe, it meant that those who had undergone such painful rites were less likely to betray their tribe or become "freeriders"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Seems to me that one of the biggest problems in the Modern World is that everybody takes things for granted, feels a sense of self-entitlement as regards any goal without having to work hard for it . Perhaps such initiation rites should be incorporated into modern cultures....

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4494904/The-women-whipped-LOVE.html

[Iguana]

Neolithic customs! They have cattle and they cook their food! These suffice largely to disrupt the normal human behavior and to introduce crazy practices.

[TylerDurden]

It isn't as crazy as it sounds. The women do this in order to show everybody that they have earned the right to be desirable adult women in their society.  There were, anyway, many  seemingly undesirable practices carried out in the Palaeolithic era, such as cannibalism and mass infanticide , along with mass extinction of the larger mammals etc. Basically, we modern tribeless  humans take far too much for granted and no longer recognise the obvious, that rights are not innate and should be earned.

[Iguana]

It's difficult to know what were the ways of our pre-fire ancestors. Maybe there was sometimes and in some places cannibalism, infanticides and the mass killing of megafauna, but did it happen already before they used the fire? It was mastered since the beginning of the middle paleolithic and this has likely disturbed and changed for the worse the behavior of our ancestors.     

Although gathering and hunting comprised most of the food supply during the Middle Paleolithic, people began to supplement their diet with seafood and began smoking and drying meat to preserve and store it. For instance the Middle Stone Age inhabitants of the region now occupied by the Democratic Republic of the Congo hunted large 6-foot (1.8 m) long catfish with specialized barbed fishing points as early as 90,000 years ago,[1][14] and Neandertals and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Africa began to catch shellfish for food as revealed by shellfish cooking in Neandertal sites in Italy about 110,000 years ago and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens sites at Pinnacle Point, in Africa.[1][15]

Anthropologists such as Tim D. White suggest that cannibalism was common in human societies prior to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, based on the large amount of “butchered human" bones found in Neandertal and other Middle Paleolithic sites.[16] Cannibalism in the Middle Paleolithic may have occurred because of food shortages.[17]

However it is also possible that Middle Paleolithic cannibalism occurred for religious reasons which would coincide with the development of religious practices thought to have occurred during the Upper Paleolithic.[18][19] Nonetheless it remains possible that Middle Paleolithic societies never practiced cannibalism and that the damage to recovered human bones was either the result of excarnation or predation by carnivores such as saber-toothed cats, lions and hyenas.[19]