ART

WARPAINT

Above are authentic Australian tribesman photos from early 1900+. White stripes and spots visually split their silhouettes for the enemy or prey. The strange shaped hat helps with that too. It's disruptive camouflage. Australian nature is not that vivid, that's why it's monochrome. In the jungle one should color himself like that British cannon on the right, which is exactly what all the hunter-gatherers in Americas did.

Despite of what historians and archeologists would've claimed if they found well preserved colored body like that, it's not "ceremonial", it's not "to scare the enemy", it has no "religious symbolism". People who's main job is survival, don't care about all that stuff, they do the same thing all modern armies do.

DEFACEMENT

That woman on the left and her whole tribe "beautify" themselves not for the "spirits of ancestors" or as a "rite of passage". Their "authentic style" is a protection from being kidnapped by other tribes. The whole tribe does it to make sure that they get used to it since childhood and it doesn't look ugly for them as it looks for us.

Other tribes used scarrification, tattoos, skull and neck elongation for the same purpose. This was practiced in many cultures on all continents. They may call it a custom or a tradition, but there is a certain practical underlying reason for it.

STRANGE RELIGIOUS CUSTOM WIDELY PRACTICED IN USA

Medical benefits of circumcision are so numerous I wonder how come nowhere else in the world newborn circumcision is recommended by doctors. Poor boys of Europe, India, China, Russia, Australia, Canada, Latin America, ... I also wonder how they figured it out in North Africa so long ago. Have Egyptians gathered medical statistics? Was it Abraham's personal research project?

Circumcision has one simple very important "side effect" that is not discussed in that wikipedia article. Yet there is a note 112 at the bottom: The Masturbation Taboo and the Rise of Routine Male Circumcision. If you look it up online you can find that historiography of both the masturbation phobia and the rise of routine circumcision shows that it has been widely accepted since the 1950s that discouraging masturbation was a major reason why doctors, educationists and childcare experts sought to introduce circumcision of both boys and girls ... effects of the onanism scare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is why it's important to read "yesterday newspapers" and do comparative analysis.

Why was it so important to prevent masturbation in the world of 1700-1900? What made Egyptians and Abraham so worried? There is also a passage in Bible about Onan on the same "issue". Did they seriously have nothing else to worry about?

The answer is the same as one that explains prevalence of males in science, business, art, business, etc. Regular masturbation in early puberty exercises one's ability to imagine. It's a skill, just like math, reading, writing, etc. No exercise, no imagination. No imagination, no abstract thinking. An easy way to make sure the masses are intellectually limited.