[BBC] "I customarily killed old women. They all died, there by the big river. I didn't used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. The women were afraid of me."
No wonder. That's the account of a man from the Aché, an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay, as told to anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado.
He explained grandmothers helped with chores and babysitting but when they got too old to be useful, you couldn't be sentimental.
Brutally, the usual method was an axe to the head. For the old men, Aché custom dictated a different fate. They were sent away - and told never to return.
What obligations do we owe to our elders? It's a question as old as humankind.
Depends on the size of their 401k.
And the answers have varied widely, at least if surviving traditional societies are any guide.
As another anthropologist, Jared Diamond, points out, the Aché are hardly outliers. Among the Kualong, in Papua New Guinea, when a woman's husband died, it was her son's solemn duty to strangle her.
In the Arctic, the Chukchi encouraged old people to kill themselves with the promise of rewards in the afterlife.
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