What was the need for early humans to do this ?
There’s no need for anyone to do it.
Every part of the human “external” anatomy that can somehow be mutilated has been somehow mutilated somewhere in the past. It’s pure coincidence that the guys slicing off babies’ foreskins came to rule compared to guys who’d put additional holes into penis shafts, stretch earlobes to absurdity, scar faces using geometric knife cuts, ad nauseam.
Lacking foreskins, stretched cartilage, elongated skulls etc. are handy ways to permanently differentiate “us” from “them”.
You looking for religious justification or some sort of medical health / social advantage reasons?
If its religious - its quite well documented in the respective holy books - to go a bit deeper though, and something that I would also like to know. WHY exactly would circumcision become the covenant with god? What difference does it make to god whether or not you’ve been sliced and diced?
Note: once the “order” has been issued, I can understand that people want to keep to it, I just don;t get why it would say so in the first place.
Kinda like the whole kosher / halal thing - I have never heard to this day quite why pigs were considered to be dirty.
This is not true.
Whilst it is used too often as a treatment for a tight foreskin, and other procedures can be effective (stretching over time), it is sometimes medically necessary.
Well, sure, but so is shoving a camera up your asshole. There is no compelling reason for a group of people as a whole to do it at birth, though, leaving the treatment of unusual medical disorders aside.
Not religious reasons !
Why did humans start this practice ?
Did it exist in earlier civilisations ? Sumerians for example .
Toxylon’s reply is good .
No cite, but I vaguely remember hearing that people living in or near deserts were prone to getting very fine particles of sand under the foreskin, sometimes causing some sort of infection. So, the snip may have been a “cure”, and possibly a preventative measure.
There are Egyptian paintings (engravings?) showing the procedure being done, to an adult, presumably because of some medical condition that required it. How common were the sorts of infections, that lead to severe inflammation, that then required this procedure were, we can’t say, just from some paintings. We can’t exclude some sort of religious application, some obscure sect with its priests “decorated” is such a fashion.
Many people, in Europe, in the Middle ages and later, refused to have circumcision performed, even when they were in constant pain – they didn’t want to look Jewish … down there. One French king, Louis 16th, maybe, couldn’t consumate his marriage for years, he was of the opinion, “God made me this way, and I’m not changing for nobody” But the pain got the better of him, eventually.
How it caught on as something to do to all male infants in the US, is a hard one to pin down. But Wikipedia may have a citation, if I recall correctly, it was one group of doctors, who championed this cause, in the late 1800’s.
Go to India. There are feral pigs running around the streets everywhere. Feral dogs too. But they serve a purpose: dogs eat all the garbage that people throw on the ground. Then, the pigs eat all the dog shit (and human shit) that’s left behind. Pigs in this part of the world have feces as a large part of your diet. And, you are what you eat!
Plus the whole trichinosis thing.
One of my older male relatives had to get circumcised after he got a yeast infection somewhere in that area (details were not provided, and I certainly didn’t want to ask). He tried to get that infection cleared up for months, and even with modern medicine couldn’t get rid of it. I can see how some village elder might have this sort of thing happen to him, and decide to put a stop to it before it starts, by having newborn boys circumcised.
Of course, the whole idea of having a body modification to distinguish Our Tribe from Those Heathens is probably part of it, maybe even the main part. My husband has several burn scars on his arms because he and his group used to play chicken with cigars*. Now the burn scars are just part of the way they reminisce.
*Light a cigar, and get it going good. Put right or left forearms against each other, and place cigar, lit end up, between them. The cigar burns down, and starts to burn each idiot. The first one to pull the arm away is “chicken”, or rather, marginally more intelligent. I’ve never seen this happen, but my husband has described it in loving detail several times.
snerk. hard.
You’re very possibly right on the first thing. Dogs and pigs tend to be fed (or eat) really nasty stuff and from then the “unclean” thing is not a stretch.
I’m not so sure about trichinosis, I don’t think tey had the idea of infection/disease like we do.
Circumcised and happy
One of the reasons was to discourage masturbation. Lord knows why they thought it would work but…
You won’t find a single clear on the why issue. There are plenty of factors, though.
One factor (I suspect) is that it’s not something you can reverse. Some tattoos can be scraped off and minor modifications like piercings may grow over and become reversible, but there’s no way a foreskin is going to come back. Of course, we could cite hundreds of other equally permanent options, so that wouldn’t be the only criteria.
I have also heard that the procedure lessens the risk for female problems, including reinfection for UTIs and yeast infections (i.e. the woman gets rid of her infection but has it reintroduced by a husband who hasn’t cleaned himself up very well), and reducing the occurrence of cervical cancer. Of course, those could be solved through a regime of good hygiene.
QUOTE=Guinastasia;11049280]One of the reasons was to discourage masturbation. Lord knows why they thought it would work but…
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Heh. See, one of the criticisms of circumcision is that by removing the protective skin, you lessen sensitivity, of the act itself. As a circumcised male, I muse at loud at that point, “If they don’t cut off your foreskin, do they at least drill a vent hole in your skull?” My joke being, it’s supposed to be even more enjoyable? I mean, it gets even better? I can barely handle the excitement now, and I’m the one who’s missing out on a marvelous experience?
Then there’s the WAGs, who maintain that general male circumcision, is the reason why our fertility (presumably, they mean contemporary US born male) is decreasing. It’s the lack of pleasure, caused by circumcision, that’s slowing our population growth. Yes…that … that’s the reason.
I don’t have a clue how it started but I will share an anecdote. When my wife was pregnant with our son we researched whether or not to have him cut. I was born in 1962 and it was just the practice then, so I was. In our research of it, I read in a book by Dr. (?) Benjamin Spock that male infants should always be circumcised because the practice of pulling the foreskin back to clean the penis would be too much sexual excitement for the baby. I immediately put that book down and never read another word of it. My son is not cut, he is 24 and is perfectly happy with his equipment.
ETA: Sorry for the hijack. 
I think it was in the Slate series about reading the Bible that I read someone’s ideas about why circumcision would be a good choice as a physical sign of religious devotion or tribal affiliation. As you say, it cannot be reversed. Since the penis is usually kept covered by clothes then it’s possible to hide one’s circumcision from hostile outsiders without seeming suspicious, something that couldn’t be so easily done with ear piercings or facial markings. At the same time it’s also simple enough to pull up one’s tunic if one needs to show proof that one is a bona fide member of the circumcision practicing group.
The procedure is easy to perform and was fairly safe even in ancient times, but painful enough that spies or other dangerous outsiders wouldn’t likely volunteer for it just to perfect their disguise. Also, having something done to one’s penis is presumably a big enough deal to most men that a prospective convert wouldn’t be willing to get cut unless they were really serious.
Most of the time there is no need.
No, but a smart village elder could have made the connection between someone eating raw pork and someone dying of salmonella/spiking a trichinosis fever. If disease was God smiting you, and the people who ate pork got diseased, it stands to reason that God didn’t want you to eat pork.
Of course, it’s probably more about the shit eating thing.