Napoleon Chagnon might be the world's most famous anthropologist and must be its most controversial. In 1964, he began visiting the Yanomamö, an indigenous group living in several hundred small villages scattered across southern Venezuela and parts of northern Brazil. Wearing almost no clothing, shifting their homes and gardens about the equatorial forest, the 25,000 Yanomamö seemed to have changed little for millennia. They were a window into the Pleistocene, Mr. Chagnon thought, a vision of humankind at its earliest stage of development. They were also an opportunity for an ambitious scholar to make a name for himself.
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