[virgil283]

To the left, any suggestion that any native peoples could be savage is to blaspheme science and any interloper must be destroyed along with his proof and his career---Americans are the only savages---no one else...eh...

[ansel12]

I own a copy of that, “Yanomamö: The Fierce People”.

[Tublecane]

Everybody knows primitives are violent and tangled up in “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Anthropologists, archaeologists, and other social scientists pretend otherwise for ideological reasons, but also through a failure to think proportionally. Obviously tribes with, say, a dozen males of fighting age won’t ever put io statistics like modern nation states in WWII. But if a mere one of them dies that’s a ten percent casualty. If ten percent of our population were to die tomorrow That’d be thirty or so million people. Think about it.

[oldplayer]

I was an anthro major in the late 60’s at Chapman College in Southern California. This was one among many field research books I had to read. It was a great relief to read something that finally wasn’t fawning over primitive people or Indians like they were the “noble savages.” The young associate professor (well he was 28 then, but that seemed old at the time LOL) that taught this particular class was an acquaintance of Chagnon’s.

I remember my reactions to this book to this day. It had a great ring of truth to it. Put me in Chagnon’s camp versus the others.

Oldplayer
(I am Choctaw)

[freeandfreezing]

There are plenty of primitive cultures that don't fit the leftist notion of the noble savage. The Jivaroan peoples in Ecuador had a culture based on violence and fighting, with the most common cause of death for men being murder. They were one of the few indigenous cultures in that area not conquered by the Spanish.

On the day that the Conquistadors demanded that they surrender and pay tribute to them thousands of Jivaro came out of the jungle and massacred all but a few of the Spanish present.

By the 1950s their houses were designed with fortifications to defend against gunfire, even among friends firearms were at the ready during every visit. A visitor would expect his host's wife to eat from the same bowl of food before he did, to reduce the chance of being poisoned.

[darth]

I learned a lot from that book about the Yanomama.

This one is even more eye opening:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_10/192-7248763-5012110?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cannibalism+headhunting+and+human+sacrifice&sprefix=cannibalis%2Caps%2C324

The history book writers often brushed over the worst aspects of both pioneers and native tribes.

BTW, some of my Commanche ancestors were very inhospitable to invading white eyes!