ABSTRACT
In the 1951 motion picture The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart plays Charlie Alnut, the gin-swilling captain of a seedy riverboat. Alnut pleads during one classic confrontation. 'A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature'. Human selection for docility counteracted nature's selection for fighting ability. The human herders of the llama, however, do not always behave as an evolutionary biologist would wish them to behave. Sociobiological theory does a good job of predicting the close ritual bond between a father-in-law and his masa, since the son-in-law's wife is carrying many of her father's genes. The herder's subsistence base depends on the growth and stability of his herd, which he also hopes to pass on intact to the children who bear his genes. Yet just as guanacos were being turned into llamas by genetic modification, hunters were being turned into farmers and herders by nongenetic means.
