You are currently viewing the summary.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Summary
Imagine you're a Yanomamö man, growing crops and hunting in the Amazon rainforest of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Someone from your village has been murdered, and you're organizing a raiding party to do a revenge killing. Whom do you choose to fight alongside you? Your brothers, thought cultural anthropologist Shane Macfarlan of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. But he got a surprise when he and famously controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who did pioneering studies of Yanomamö genealogy and warfare in the 1960s and 1970s, took a new look at Chagnon's decades-old data. Men who participated in the same killing were largely related by marriage rather than blood. The new research suggests that warriors' alliances give them access to potential in-laws and offers a twist on Chagnon's original ideas about how being a warrior boosts men's fitness.
