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Tierney's use of the Jungleman and Valera life histories to support his thesis and then totally ignoring in these same sources major eyewitness and participant accounts of women capture, rape and the murder of children is not an example of investigative journalism that we can trust

Although his documentation with footnotes and citation of sources would seem impressive, it does not hold up to straightforward tests of what the sources really say and what Tierney reports them to say. These distortions give testament to a lack of journalistic responsibility and ethics.

It was at this stage that a journalist named Patrick Tierney, who had earlier written a book claiming that human sacrifice survived among some Indian Andean tribes, spent a year there. Darkness in El Dorado, the book on Tierney’s adventures among the gold miners which was to have been published by Viking in 1995, never appeared. Instead, last year WW Norton announced it was publishing his book, which had now become a tale of ‘How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon’,

Chagnon had enjoyed good relations with the Roman Catholic Salesian missionaries who control access to most of the region. Indeed, the relationship was so good, he told me, that he was asked by one priest to arrange the murder of another missionary who had gone off the rails and taken up with a Yanomamö concubine far up the river (he declined). But the relationship started to unravel as the Yanomamö grew more famous.

Some of his enemies are personal. He is by all accounts a boisterous man (he calls the two professors who have attacked him ‘absolute zeros’). Moving among the Yanomamö, Chagnon had the sort of personality — or discovered it in himself— that could thrive and impose itself on a brutal and treacherous political environment. For the first months of his fieldwork, while he was learning the language, the Yanomamö systematically lied to him. He needed to collect genealogies in order to trace the histories of the people he moved among, yet among the Yanomamö there is a taboo against using people’s names, and especially’ the names of the dead.

Neel and Chagnon ‘greatly exacerbated’ and probably started the epidemic of measles that killed so many Yanomamö. They caused or at least worsened the epidemic by their use of a virulent vaccine (Edmonston B) that was quite wrong for use on a population like this with no prior exposure to measles.

The most Tierney would concede at a press conference is that ‘the question of transmissibility [whether the vaccine could have caused the epidemic] is still up in the air’, at which point Dr Yvonne Maldonado, the expert on infectious diseases and childhood immunisation on the panel, finally lost her cool: ‘You’re not a physician, not an epidemiologist and not even a scientist as far as I can tell... There is absolutely no evidence for transmissibility.’ By now she was almost shouting at the man two feet away from her. ‘There is no evidence! The vaccine did not cause an epidemic. It did not cause deaths.’

No one doubts that the situation of the Yanomamo and of the other indigenous peoples of South America is truly dreadful.

When I pressed Professor Sponsel on the question of whether he should have checked these damaging allegations that a colleague had been responsible for hundreds of deaths before passing them on. he grew quite heated. ‘I’m not a medical doctor. My role, ethically, was to alert the AAA because of my concern with human rights. After that, the only role I had was to respond to questions when people asked me in a civil, polite manner. Terry Turner and I wrote that memo to the two top people in the organisation and sent copies to four other people in the committee on ethics. Whoever leaked it is the one who should be sanctioned or censured.