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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

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