Quotes About Yanomamö

Why do Yanomamö men risk killing another? Those who do and survive end up with more wives and more babies. In one extensive, long-term study, 137 men were Unokais and 243 were not. The Unokais had, on average, 1.63 wives (polygamy is legal) and 4.91 children. The non-Unokais averaged only 0.63 wives and 1.59 children.

Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for the Spanish," Ferguson said. "It could push fairly ordinary people to do things that they wouldn't consider doing otherwise.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balée calls "agricultural regression," these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging.

The population that I already mentioned as having the world's lowest recorded salt intake, Brazil's Yanomamo Indians, also had the world's lowest average blood pressure, an astonishingly low 96 over 61.

We should have gone little beyond the Yanomamo if the net outcome of the sexual revolution is a secure position for women at the head of mace squads or in the nuclear command posts.