10. Back in 2,000BC, young men on the Russian steppes may have been forced to kill and eat their own dogs to be seen as adults
Life on the Eurasian steppes 4,000 years ago was about as tough as it gets. Young boys would have been forced to grow up fast. And, according to archaeologists studying Bronze Age settlements in this part of modern-day Russia, boys came of age in a very grisly way indeed. Recent investigations suggest that each winter, villages would kill the dogs they lived alongside. While they would have been used as guarding dogs to protect sheep from wolves rather than kept as pets, the people would have become attached to these dogs, with the young boys likely to have grown particularly close to their canine companions.
Boys wouldn’t just have to kill their dogs to be seen as men in their communities. Since recovered ancient bones show signs of being stripped of their meat, scholars believe they would actually have to kill them, butcher them and then eat them. If they managed to carry out this grisly task, they would be seen as adult males, with all the privileges and responsibilities this would have entailed back in the Bronze Age.