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Patrick Tierney is an American freelance writer based in Pittsburgh. Since the publication of his controversial book, Darkness in El Dorado, his profile has been low and he has rarely appeared in public to defend it.

In 2000, Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, which accused geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo people, among other damning allegations. This work received good reviews and was nominated for a National Book Award. Tierney's accusations against anthropologist Chagnon were accepted as fact by the New York Times book reviewer John Horgan and prompted Chagnon's early retirement. However, at least one reviewer, John Tooby, saw the book as a work of "fiction", despite the massive documentation, interviews numbering into the hundreds, academic articles cited, successful Freedom of Information Act requests, and Tierney's own visits to the Yanomamo people.

Several investigations of the veracity of Tierney's allegations against Neel and Chagnon in Darkness in El Dorado were conducted by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and outside evaluators. Tierney's book was condemned by a number of academic researchers and professional associations, including the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Society of Human Genetics, The ultimate conclusion was that the allegations made by Tierney against Neel and Chagnon were fraudulently presented.

In 2004 Thomas A. Gregor and Daniel R. Gross published their investigation of the AAA's behavior,  and in 2005  called for the membership of the AAA to rescind the organization's support of the book. It passed overwhelmingly, 846 to 338.

Investigations of Tierney's charges
Tierney's charges against Neel and Chagnon were initially investigated by the Peacock Commission, later known as the El Dorado Task Force, formed by the AAA. It supported Tierney and questioned the conduct of Neel and Chagnon; its findings were accepted by the AAA board in May 2002.

Because of dissension within the organization, the AAA subsequently requested an outside investigative team, which determined in a preliminary report that the "book appears to be deliberately fraudulent", and that "Patrick Tierney has misconstrued or misrepresented his primary sources to a considerable degree in an effort to support his allegations." The investigators concluded it was not Chagnon who committed any wrongdoing, but Tierney, who fraudulently altered evidence to support a story he either at best imagined or at worst manufactured.

Almost all of the lengthy allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected in an outside investigation by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000.

The AAA rescinded the El Dorado Task Force report in 2005, stating that its findings had "ignored basic principles of fairness and due process". It further concluded: "the report has damaged the reputations of its targets, distracted public attention from the real sources of the Yanomami tragedy and misleadingly suggested that anthropologists are responsible for Yanomami suffering". However, only in 2009 through the efforts of an attorney, did the AAA remove the Task Force report, which included Tierney's charges that Chagnon gave money to the Yanomami to kill each other, from its website.

The accusations of medical improprieties contained in Tierney's book were investigated by the Medical Team of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and found to be false.

In a peer-reviewed publication in the Journal Human Nature, Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science and an outsider to the debate, concluded that Tierney's claims were largely false and that AAA was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods while failing to protect "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

Books
A previous book by Tierney, The Highest Altar: Unveiling the Mystery of Human Sacrifice (1989), claims to document ritual human sacrifice in the high Andes mountains of Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.