The Tasaday announced as a Stone Age tribe

JUN 07 1971

Manuel Elizalde, head of the Philippine government agency PANAMIN, announced the discovery of the Tasaday, a cave-dwelling group in Mindanao presented as having lived in total isolation since the Stone Age. National Geographic and the world's press covered them extensively, while Elizalde restricted access with armed guards. After Marcos fell in 1986, the Swiss journalist Oswald Iten found the caves deserted and reported that neighbouring tribespeople had been paid to perform primitiveness. Usually filed as a straightforward hoax, but linguistic work by Lawrence Reid found the group genuine and genuinely unfamiliar with agriculture. The exaggeration was the timescale: their isolation probably lasted a few generations, perhaps 150 years, not millennia.