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Do you really need your skin in a hot climate? It's the biggest organ which means a lot of unnecessary weight. The stuff inside your body is pretty much held in place by muscles, tendons and bones, the skin does nothing.
I vaguely remember reading in the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid about someone who did this. I don't remember much about it other than that it looked really scary, and wondering why on Earth someone would do that. If I recall correctly, they did it out of curiosity, and of course were always at seriously high risk for infections and deadly illness and such.
Besides as acting as a physical barrier against the quadrillions+ things that wang to kill you? As well gives you the ability to produce vitamin D?
Flaying was a particularly horrible form of torture and execution in the ancient world. The victim would be restrained and the executioner would use a razor-sharp knife to peel their skin off them. Boiling water or other hot items were sometimes used to soften up the subcutaneous layer of fat to make the job easier. The aim was to keep the victim alive for as long as possible and inflict the maximum pain. If the executioner was skilled and no major veins or arteries were severed, death could take days, and might be the result of shock, blood or fluid loss, hypothermia, or infection.
An infamous case of flaying involved the female mathematician and pagan philosopher Hyphatia who was murdered in Alexandria in 415. The fact a mere woman dared to question the validity of Christianity and that her intelligence was highly respected by many educated people outraged the local Christians so much that a mob dragged her out of her carriage, hauled her into a nearby church, stripped her and flayed her with either oyster shells or broken tiles. In a typically shameless move, the Christian church later adopted Hypatia as a symbol of Christian virtue, and she was probably in part the basis of the mythical Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
Damn, that's pretty ruthless. At least it's not socially acceptable to do that in Christianity(and all other religions I know of) nowadays.
To be fair to the loving Jesus freaks, they didn't invent skinning alive as a punishment.
As far as I know, the earliest records of it are from the Assyrian Empire. The Aztecs skinned the victims of their sacrificial religious rites too, but it seems this happened after they were dead. And it was known in ancient China too. I believe it was still occasionally used in Mediaeval Europe, but only in cases where it was decided that the most severe punishment was called for. I can see how occasional public demonstrations of what would happen to you if you stepped out of line would have a deterrent effect.
I guess the bottom line is that the flip side of our ability to feel empathy for other humans means that we also have the ability to imagine the absolute worst, most painful thing that could be done to us.
This post reminds me of an old horror story about a parasitic nervous system that was, well, literally just a human nervous system that adapted to live that way.