>>509543429
Ancient civilizations were actually keen on drastic body modification using invasive surgery, drugs, and apprenticeships starting at 3 years of age even for things like horsemanship which results in changes to skeletal structure as well. That's how you end up with someone like Atalanta who is a teenage girl that is picked as a warrior to go on the same mission the Argives thought it was important enough to send Heracles on as well. Atalanta and Heracles are contemporaries of similar standing...but she's a teenage girl.
Head binding and elongated skulls? That's the tip of the iceberg. They were processing plants and animals into hormone therapies, juicing up children in ways that would make the modern anti-trans crowd's heads explode. Athena and Artemis are echoes of a caste of teenage supersoldiers that existed in the Bronze Age, but the oracles came from the same system as well, trained for a different task. In either case though, it's all about the stage of life from pubescence to motherhood, and they're the ones who ran the world.

Medea is said to have mastered the art to the degree that with one cream she could make herself into an old woman and with another return to the bloom of youth. Unfortunately the venom in the supreme drugs causes a terrible thirst, like that which can become bloodlust (and living bodies are necessary to mix the drugs anyway)...or the thirst that might make one cry out to Romans overseeing an execution.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-78721-8