Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 227 began to run out before everyone could be appropriately vaccinated, but it was not because of some neglect on Neel’s or Chagnon’s part (Turner and Nelson 2004). The independent scholars who came to this history before me had clearly already shown that, far from being remembered as a monster as Tierney would wish, Neel really ought to be remembered as a great humanitarian. For his part, Chagnon ought to be remembered not as the genocidal maniac of Tierney’s fantasy, but as the key provider of logistics during the frantic medical response to the tragic epidemic. I had to wonder when I came upon this story years after all this, given the reality as evidenced by so very many documentary sources, how did Tierney’s falsehoods get as far as they did? To answer that, one must really understand how and why certain individuals—but especially leaders within the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—played a supporting role to Tierney’s work. This was a supporting role that ultimately threatened the AAA’s integrity and indeed the integrity of American anthropology itself. Thus, while this paper provides some previously uncollected and critically informative background material on Tierney’s work, it chiefly seeks to highlight the problematic aiding and abetting of Tierney by scholars who had the power to know better and to do better. Darkness Descends In September 2000, Patrick Tierney’s work on the South American Yanomamö people, which culminated in the book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Tierney 2001), became internationally known because of the distribution of a memo written by Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel to the AAA leadership (Turner and Sponsel 2000). Yet in fact, for more than a decade before this, Turner, Sponsel, and a number of Brazilian anthropologists had been trying to go after Chagnon for his work on the Yanomamö (Carneiro de Cunha 1989; Sponsel 1998; Turner 1994). Turner and Sponsel were particularly critical of Chagnon’s sociobiological approach. Nevertheless, these earlier objections had not really grown legs, perhaps because Chagnon had forcefully responded to claims he saw as untrue and wrong-headed (Chagnon 1989), or perhaps because the objections were not nearly as sensationalistic as Tierney’s would turn out to be. Long before Tierney’s book, Chagnon—a forceful, fearless, prominent, and articulate promoter of sociobiological anthropology—had also acquired detractors in camps beyond anthropology. In the early 1990s, someone started distributing anonymous anti-Chagnon packets at the AAA meetings and directly through the mail to Chagnon’s colleagues (Fox 1994; Wolf 1994). Anthropologist Frank Salamone (1997:97) has revealed that these defamatory packets were actually being distributed by the Roman Catholic Salesians whose missions Chagnon had been publicly criticizing, saying that the Salesians were thoughtlessly harming the Yanomamö. So it wasn’t as if Chagnon had not already been the subject of various slings and arrows. But in interviews, Turner and Sponsel both suggested they were frustrated over the failure of the various pre-Darkness charges against Chagnon to garner much