Free Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris Page A

truth that to have many men you must start by having many women. The failure of band and village societies to act in conformity with this truth suggests not that warfare was caused by infanticide, or infanticide by warfare, but that both infanticide and warfare, as well as the sexual hierarchy that went with these scourges, were caused by the need to disperse populations and depress their rates of growth.

5
Proteins and the Fierce People
    Warfare and male bravado play such a conspicuous role in Yanomamo life that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of Pennsylvania State University calls them the Fierce People. Dramatic monographs and films show the Yanomamo, who live in the forests along the border between Brazil and Venezuela near the headwaters of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro rivers, making virtually perpetual war against one another. I mentioned earlier that 33 percent of Yanomamo male deaths are caused by wounds received in battle. Moreover, the Yanomamo practice an especially brutal form of male supremacy involving polygyny, frequent wife beating, and gang rape of captured enemy women.
    The Yanomamo are a crucial case not only because they are one of the best-studied village societies in which warfare is actively being practiced, but because Chagnon—who knows them best—has denied that the high level of homicide within and between villages is caused by reproductive and ecological pressures:
    Enormous tracts of land, most of it cultivable and abounding with game is
[sic]
found between villages.… Whatever else might be cited as a “cause” of warfare between the villages,
competition for resources is not a very convincing one
[Chagnon’s italics]. The generally intensive warfare patterns found in aboriginal tropical forest cultures do not correlate well withresource shortages or competition for land or hunting areas.… Recent trends in ethnological theory are tending more and more to crystallize around the notion that warfare … must always be explainable in terms of population density, scarcity of strategic resources such as territory or “proteins,” or a combination of both. The Yanomamo are an important society, for their warfare cannot be explained in this way.
    Despite their cultivation of plantains, bananas, and other crops, the overall density of the Yanomamo is only about .5 persons per square mile—not very different from that of Amazonian hunter-collectors. Their villages are large by hunter-collector standards, but settlements “fission” (that is, split up) well before they reach a total of 200 inhabitants. This makes Yanomamo villages puny by comparison with Indian settlements on the mainstreams of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, where the first European explorers encountered villages of 500 to 1,000 people and continuous rows of houses lining the banks for five miles at a stretch. If, as Chagnon claims there is an abundance of land and game, why has overall density and village size among the Yanomamo remained so low? The difference cannot be blamed on warfare itself, since mainstream peoples were if anything even more bellicose than those who live in the forests. Donald Lathrap has cogently argued that all groups who live away from the main rivers, like the Yanomamo, are the “wreckage” of more evolved societies “forced off the flood plains into less favorable environments.”
    The Yanomamo make no attempt to disguise the fact that they practice female infanticide. This results in an extremely unbalanced sex ratio in the age group of fourteen and under. Chagnon has studied twelve Yanomamovillages located in the most intensive war zone, where the average ratio was 148 boys to 100 girls. In one warlike village studied by Jacques Lizot the juvenile sex ratio was 260:100. On the other hand, three villages studied by William Smole in the Parima highlands outside the most intensive war zone had an average juvenile sex ratio of 109:100.
    According to Chagnon, the fact that females are at a