A woman from the African tribe of Mursi in Omo Valley, Ethiopia, displays her lip plate - an expression of female maturity and a signal that she is ready to bear children - achieved by stretching the piercing with discs of increasing size

Left, a member of the Bagobo people from coastal Mindanao in the Philippines displays filed teeth in a photo taken circa 1910 and right, a women in 2008 from a Baka tribe of pygmies in the Dzanga-Sangha Forest Reserve, Central African Republic. Human tooth sharpening has been practiced by many cultures throughout history - sometimes for spiritual or class reasons, and in other cases to imitate animals

Women from the Kayan Lahwi tribe in Myanmar start adding brass coils to their necks from the age of five, the weight of which pushes the collar bone down and compresses the rib cage to give the illusion of longer necks

Women of the Apatani tribe in Arunachal Pradesh, India, traditionally wore these nose plugs to make themselves look less attractive, and thus less likely to be attacked or kidnapped by men from other tribes, though these days it's a dying tradition

Another woman from the Mursi tribe wearing a lip plate and a set of cow horns atop her head. The more decorative her appearance, the higher her standing is

This Mursi woman, pictured with her infant, is not wearing her lip plate but the gaping hole remains. Usually these discs are crafted from clay or wood and inserted to attract a husband

An African woman with stretched earlobes and a chunky lip piercing, left, and right, a self-proclaimed 'god woman' with a spear piercing her tongue participating in the Pooram Festival in Kerala, India

Left, Dennis Avner, also known as the Stalking Cat, was a Nevada man famed for his extreme body modifications who died in 2012 at the age of 54. Pictured right is Argentinian Victor Peralta, who has 90 per cent of his body tattooed, displaying his split tongue 

A worshipper at the 2012 Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, Thailand, where men and women prove their religious devotion by taking part in ritualistic self-mutilation and pain trials

This 95-year-old belongs to the last generation of Chinese women who had their feet bound to inhibit growth from a young age, an agonising process traditionally reserved for the higher classes, in part to display subservience to their husbands

In Indonesia's Dani Village, New Guinea, some women like this one cut off the tips of their fingers when a relative dies

Left, a man from the Abyei region of Sudan with scars inflicted on his forehead - a traditional rite of passage whereby wounds are created and stopped from healing - and right, a young woman in in South Omo, Ethiopia, with similar scars on her arm 

The tattooed face of a former Longwa Village headhunter in India'a Nagaland. Until as recently as the 1960s, these headhunters took great pride in killing their enemies from other tribes then severing and displaying their heads