Author Napoleon Chagnon had based his new novel Noble Savages up his experience of living with an Indian tribe in the Amazon.

Little did author Napoleon Chagnon know that his encounter with an isolated Indian tribe in the Amazon and his decision to experience the way they lived would change his own life forever and the journey would last him a lifetime.

Recalling his first encounter with the tribe, Chagnon says he was left aghast. Standing before him were some horrendous looking men with "green slime" running down their nose and holding drawn arrows. Before he knew it, more than 20 even more hideous looking circled the author as if they were going to tear him apart in an instant.

As time passed by, Chagnon realized what a great sense of humor the tribe members had. He reveals that it became a joke among them about who could fool Chagnon the best.

"What they did was connive with each other to invent a whole series of fake names for specific people in the village, and whenever I would check with another informant, the other informant would of course play along with the fabrication and give me the same names as the previous one did. ... I was there for six or seven months before I realized what they had done and I only realized what they had done by going to a different village, and when I reached that different village ... I mentioned cautiously the name of the head man and his wife, and they just burst out laughing because, in effect, they had told me that the names of these two people were various components of one's genitalia," reveals the anthropologist.

Chagnon reveals that there has always been a resistance in anthropology and sociology to accept biological or psychological explanations for either culture or society and he was one of them.

"The fact that endorsed what was later to be known as sociobiology, was also considered to be a defect on my part and reason to attack and discredit me," concludes Chagnon.