I hope this is ok but..........

Here's my hypothesis:

Maybe they hang the skins up for the same reason a wolf pisses on a tree. To mark thier territory. A wolf comes past and smells the piss of another wolf on a nearby tree, and they immediatly know that they've tresspassed on someone's territory.

Perhaps it's the same principle with preds, they hand up the skins as a way of marking thier territory, their hunting grounds.

Exactly, Malus-Darkblade

After hunting down a group of prey, the Predator frays them (skins them and hangs) as a sign of his hunting ground. If their was a honorable prey there, the Predator would have collected its skull and left the body where it were.

I think it`s just to let most of the blood drain from the body, so the flesh will be dryer and easier to manipulate.

Well I think that they keep the skin as a pelt. Pretty much all human hunters do that too.

well this is just a guess (and what my dad told when i first watched predator) but the pred might eat the skins

Uh I dont think that they would do that. In much of the shows I watch tell me that the hunters only remove certaint things but eating the skin would disgrace the body and the hunt.

And apart from that, would be realy... useless.. To compre the difference in energy use, it would be like a man killing a snail and eating it`s skin.

Territory, and sometimes if it's a Badblood, they use it for clothes. But that's what I heard from various Google sources, and since Google is a bitch, I'm not entirely sure what to think.

There are many different possibilities as to why they skin & hang their victims, although my theory has always been that it was to mark out their hunting grounds, or "territory" if you want to put it that way. The notion that they would keep the skins as pelts, as mentioned earlier, is also possible, but it seems like the skin of a human for example would be rather worthless & not worth taking for that reason alone.

i agree with malus in the book im writing the predators have a skin room in their ship and a trophy room. but also where they had killed many people in one area the predators stacked the skin as a way of getting people to come by leaving blood tracks to the skin to set an ambush on the aliens or humans

Aaah, but your book is not canon.... Until we have an official reason, maybe from the movies to come, or from the sites to come, speculation is all we have...

i belive it to be with prey that were a threat so if a predator found someone and killed them because they were a threat it wouldnt be fare to take their skull when they were the one that hunted you

but, if it's for territory, why don't the pred just move the bodies further apart, Yes i do understand blood smells but putting the bodies so close togeather. If it was one body yes i do understand the marking the territory like a wall. The skin being so far and the body being the other wall. Anyways, i do agree about the using it as a pelt seems rather.........predatorish...but tht's my thoughts...o wells...

Um, well, I LIKE the scent theory, but certain things just don't add up...

A bunch of flayed skins don't mark the territory of any predator for three reasons:

1) Any human can just as easily flay and hang the skin of another human, so there is no distinction between hunting grounds and a psychopath when it comes to skinning.

2) Flesh stripped does not carry a scent, and there is no way for one pred to know which pred did the job, whereas wolves all carry distinct scents to distinguish one another.

3) Skin decomposes easily, and would need to be annually refreshed to ever be effective.

Plus, even though we never saw the flesh from the humans, we DID see the stripped corpses on the "hunting grounds." It makes more sense that the pred took the skins with it to keep as a trophy or pelt than place it on a border of an area already carrying the distinct signature of hanging fleshless corpses...

Another likely theory is intimidation. Generally the skinned corpses are hung in a position where they can be seen by the eyes of others. Terrifying & psychologically breaking down their prey in this way would make their behaviour much more interesting during a hunt.

As far as the "territory" theory goes, while Crow did bring up some good points as to how it would reasonably be nowhere near as effective as the way most animals today mark their own individual territories, it is still possible that the skinned bodies represent a warning to other yautja not to intrude on the hunting grounds of another. In general, just the sight of a skinned body could be a sign to leave immediate vicinity, so as to not interfere with another yautja's hunt, rather than it actually marking out a specific territory.

AHHHHHH! i was gonna say what
Stalk did.........then i read the last post on the thread. YOU STOLE IT!.......just kidding.

I agree with the intimidation theory though.

There's a problem with that psycopath thing. Not big but it's still a problem. A completel psycho wouldn't be using the same material a Predator uses when hanging up their skinned prey (from what I've seen and learned Predators are very weary of their surroundings and happenings and would notice this little detail). They would also probably leave their skin too.

Not to mention even a psychopath could not lift a human body ,usually a male, with a good physique and slightly muscular and probably about 200+ lbs., up 20 or more feet off the ground, tie a rope around its feet and hang it. That would require massive strength, which a human does not posess, or it would also require a massive system of pulleys which I'm not sure a psychopath would be likely to rig up.