June 17, 2012Hadley's Hope,
it could wll be some form of surture after the fact i.e a tatoo. Many civilizations have similar rites and scarification.There's nothing unmanly or anything in fact scars are considered a rite of passage to mnhood.
Remember, these are supposed to be some massive special ops, think Titans, or the ones who were behind enemy lines in vietnam circa 1970s.
They have been given the task to start what could possibly be the Cambrian explosion. They seem to live in a military type highly secretive (for example all the hidden ships) enclave guarding a possible military engineered biological weapon. And they knew how dangerous it must have been if something of that massive , and I mean massive evolutionary matrix escaped. The Engineer would definitely see himself as differnt to anything sharing his phenotype.
On another note, IMO, the markings resemble some kind of Sumerian script, perhaps something taken fro the epc story of gilgamesh. Just sayin ;)