Not that the Yanomamo know who Keith Richards is, but, boy, can they identify.
Richards, the Rolling Stones legend, was busy distancing himself Wednesday from a report that he'd once snorted his late father's ashes.
Meanwhile, from deep within the Amazon, the primitive Yanomamo (or Yanomami) have long been subject of reports that they ingest the cremated remains of their deceased tribal members, according to Sang-Hee Lee, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.
"When their loved ones die, they make ashes of them, and they add them to a broth, and then they share that," Lee said Wednesday, recounting the purported ritual.
The purpose of the ceremony, Lee explained, is to become "one" with the fallen.
"There's a part of the dead relative that will be part of themselves from now on," Lee said. "It's a form of honor."
There's another thing about ash-spiked soup, or ash-spiked cocaine, as the case may be: It's a form of cannibalism.
"In fact, it's probably the only observed form of cannibalism [today]," said Lee, author of the academic article "Cannibalism: The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly."
Not that modern-day tribes are keen on copping to feasting on humans, according to Lee, with members often telling researchers that they don't do it, but that they hear the other tribe around the corner, as it were, does.
As for Richards, he pointed his guitar-picking finger at NME, the British music magazine that quoted the rocker as saying, "The strangest thing I've to snort? My father. I snorted my father.
"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow," Richards went on, per NME. "It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."
In the aftermath, Richards' camp, which did not respond to an E! Online request for comment when the story broke Tuesday, classified the comment as "an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true. File under April Fool's joke."
In a statement on the Rolling Stones' official Website, Richards, nearly as famous for his drug exploits as his hit records, took exception not only to the notion that he would inhale his factory-worker father, Bert Richards, who died in 2002 at age 84, but that he would inhale cocaine.
"The complete story is lost in the usual slanting!" Richards said. "I was trying to say how tight Bert and I were. That tight!!! I wouldn't take cocaine at this point in my life unless I wished to commit suicide."
NME, meanwhile, was standing by its headline-generating quote.
"He didn't offer the information. I had to ask him a couple of questions to get the information out of him," Richards interviewer Mark Beaumont said on NME's Website Wednesday. "He didn't come straight out with that."
If one were to snort one's father, straight and sans any illicit drugs, one would be within one's rights. At least in the United States.
"Really, there are no rules or regulations what you do with [ashes], as long as you're doing it on your own private property or with the permission of the property owner," T. Scott Gilligan, general counsel for the National Funeral Directors Association, said Wednesday.
"There's nothing about snorting it, or mixing it in with the planting of a tree," Gilligan continued. "Other people turn [the ashes] into jewelry."
According to Richards, he went the tree route.
"The truth of the matter is that I planted a sturdy English oak," Richards said on the Rolling Stones site. "I took the lid off the box of ashes, and he [his father] is now growing oak trees, and would love me for it!!!"
It sounds for the best. Ashes, after all, are no Clif Bars.
Said Lee: "There's no nutritional value."