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their taunts with a response. On other occasions, he ambles over to the
periphery of the harem, then rears up and puts on a display of outrage
that chases the young Turks away. But from time to time, the massed
delinquents continue their challenge, starting a fight that can be brutal
indeed. If they are lucky, the upstarts trounce their dignified superior
thoroughly, chasing him from his comfortable home.
Then the newly triumphant members of the younger generation
execute an atrocity. They wade into the screaming females, grabbing
babies left and right. They swing the infants against the trees, smash
them against the ground, bite their heads and crush their skulls. They
kill and kill. When the orgy of bloodlust is over, not an infant remains.
Yet the females in their sexual prime are completely unhurt.32
The mass murder is anything but random. Like Effie's infan-
ticide, it has a simple goal. This cluster of wives was raising the
children of the old man who just fled. As long as the ladies continued
to suckle infants, they would be tied to the children of the toppled
authority figure. A natural birth-control device called lactational
amenorrhea would keep them uninterested in sex, preventing them
from entering estrus,33 and blocking the females from carrying the seed
of the new conquerors.
When a mother's baby is killed and her suckling stops, however,
the whole game changes. Her biochemistry shifts, resurrecting her
sexual interest. She becomes an empty womb waiting to have another
child. And this time, the child will not belong to the deposed monarch-
-it will carry the legacy of one of the invaders.
But surely humans don't indulge in such barbarities. Or do they?
In the rainforests near the Amazon live a people called the Yanomamo.
Their ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, calls them "the fierce people."
They pride themselves on their cruelty, glorying in it so
enthusiastically that they make a great show of beating their wives.
And the wives are as much a part of this viciousness as the husbands.
A spouse who does not carry enough scars from her husband's blows
allenge the patriarch. He sometimes sits aloof, refusing to dignify
<< < GO > >>
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their taunts with a response. On other occasions, he ambles over to the
periphery of the harem, then rears up and puts on a display of outrage
that chases the young Turks away. But from time to time, the massed
delinquents continue their challenge, starting a fight that can be brutal
indeed. If they are lucky, the upstarts trounce their dignified superior
thoroughly, chasing him from his comfortable home.
Then the newly triumphant members of the younger generation
execute an atrocity. They wade into the screaming females, grabbing
babies left and right. They swing the infants against the trees, smash
them against the ground, bite their heads and crush their skulls. They
kill and kill. When the orgy of bloodlust is over, not an infant remains.
Yet the females in their sexual prime are completely unhurt.32
The mass murder is anything but random. Like Effie's infan-
ticide, it has a simple goal. This cluster of wives was raising the
children of the old man who just fled. As long as the ladies continued
to suckle infants, they would be tied to the children of the toppled
authority figure. A natural birth-control device called lactational
amenorrhea would keep them uninterested in sex, preventing them
from entering estrus,33 and blocking the females from carrying the seed
of the new conquerors.
When a mother's baby is killed and her suckling stops, however,
the whole game changes. Her biochemistry shifts, resurrecting her
sexual interest. She becomes an empty womb waiting to have another
child. And this time, the child will not belong to the deposed monarch-
-it will carry the legacy of one of the invaders.
But surely humans don't indulge in such barbarities. Or do they?
In the rainforests near the Amazon live a people called the Yanomamo.
Their ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, calls them "the fierce people."
They pride themselves on their cruelty, glorying in it so
enthusiastically that they make a great show of beating their wives.
And the wives are as much a part of this viciousness as the husbands.
A spouse who does not carry enough scars from her husband's blows
allenge the patriarch. He sometimes sits aloof, refusing to dignify
<< < GO > >>