In the late afternoon, family and friends sit outside a high dome-roofed Karo home. The Karo excel in body art. Before a dance, they will decorate their faces and torsos elaborately using local white chalk, pulverised rock and other natural pigments. The polka dot or guinea fowl plumage effect is popular. Young men settle disputes by fighting with hippo hide whips, which leave nasty weals on a person's skin, as evidenced on the shoulders of the young man in this picture.The Karo are a small tribe living in three main villages along the lower reaches of the Omo River in southwest Ethiopia. The largest village, Duss, is home to almost half the population of around 3,500 people. Once solely agriculturalists, the people now keep livestock as well.They are Omotic people and speak a dialect of their larger and more powerful neighbours, the Hamar, from whom they originated in the distant past.