[3] His first book, The Highest Altar: Unveiling the Mystery of Human Sacrifice (Penguin, New York, 1990), was the result of being sent to do research in South America for Omni magazine between 1983 and 1989.
The book discusses gold mining operations in the territory of the Yanomami people of the Amazon, alleging killings and severe human rights abuses by independent miners and gold-mining companies.
[citation needed] In 2000 Tierney published his book Darkness in El Dorado, accusing the American anthropologist Professor Napoleon Chagnon and his colleague James V. Neel, among other things, of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö people.
Their report, which was issued by the AAA in May 2002, held that Chagnon had both represented the Yanomamö in harmful ways and failed in some instances to obtain proper consent from both the government and the groups he studied.
[11] Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year of research that Tierney's claims were false and the American Anthropological Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".