234 So Who is Patrick Tierney? Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 In my interview with her, the historian of science Susan Lindee asked a key question: Why did Tierney publish a book so easy to refute? To quote Lindee: How could [Tierney] publish something so incendiary, if he knew—or should have known—that it could be so easily contradicted? It was so easy to contradict! It took me an afternoon [looking at Neel’s papers in response to the Turner-Sponsel memo] to say this central claim did not happen. And others joined in to contradict virtually every claim he made about the vaccine, the biological details, the fieldwork, the sequence of events (Lindee 2008; see also Lindee’s letter to colleagues of September 21, 2000, reproduced in Hagen et al. 2001:61–62). Unfortunately, I have not really been able to figure out why or how Tierney published work so easy to refute. I honestly can’t figure out much about Tierney. Among the major players, he was the only person not to respond to my interview requests. It’s unusual for an author to be so reluctant to discuss his National Book Award finalist. A mid-2009 search of records conducted by Dalman Investigations at my request indicated that Tierney, then aged fifty-five, had no detectible record of employment history other than publishing two books, The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice in 1990 with Penguin, and Darkness in 2001 with Norton. He fashions himself as an anthropological reporter, but apparently he has had no degree, training, or employment in anthropology or journalism. In my research, I learned that, after his first book, Highest Altar, but before Darkness, Tierney penned a 400-page book called Last Tribes of El Dorado: The Gold Wars in the Amazon Rain Forest for Viking Press. For reasons Viking would not tell me, Last Tribes reached advanced review stage in 1994 or 1995 but was never published. I obtained two identical copies of Last Tribes, one via interlibrary loan and one through an online bookseller. Last Tribes turns out to be a sort of memoir of Tierney’s wanderings through the rainforest as he attempts to gather dirt on illegal gold mining operations that are seriously harming the environment and the native peoples, including the Yanomamö. There’s not much mention of Chagnon himself in Last Tribes, and no mention of Neel. Chagnon is mostly identified as a subscriber to sociobiology, which Tierney takes to mean any explanation that sees sex, violence, or selfishness as a motivator in human life (Tierney 1994:34–35, 79, 99, 115–116, 170, 219–221). But we do learn plenty about Tierney in Last Tribes. Tierney reveals that he has lied about his identity repeatedly, including to some indigenous people, by representing himself as a Chilean gold miner (Tierney 1994:29, 75, 87, 88, 131). This was confirmed for me by the Consolata missionary and anthropologist Father Giovanni Saffirio, who occasionally associated with Tierney during this period: “[Tierney] traveled through the area with a fake ID card saying he owned a mining company in Chile where he was born. He cheated gold buyers saying he was eager to open a ‘garimpo’ (a mining business) in Roraima” (Saffirio 2009). In Last Tribes, Tierney also admits having repeatedly gone into Yanomamö territory without FUNAI’s (the appropriate authority’s) legal permission to do so