The Tasaday tribe is a small stone age tribe that were discovered on the forested and mountainous Philippine island of Mindanao on June 7 1971 by Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister. Elizalde supposedly made contact with the Tasaday via a tribal frontiersman named Dafal, who reportedly had met them many years earlier on a hunting foray with his father into the deep interior of the forest. The population numbered 7 men, 6 women, and 14 children.
The Tasaday were said to have remained in complete isolation from outside civilization until their discovery. They spoke their own language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. The tribe was subject to a great deal of publicity, appearing on the cover of National Geographic and in a National Geographic documentary "The Last Tribes of Mindanao" shown on January 12, 1972. They were visited by Charles A. Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Before anthropologists were able to get a more sustained look, however, President Ferdinand Marcos declared a 45,000-acre Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.
Elizalde fled the country in 1983 right after the Aquino assasination, along with millions of dollars stolen from a foundation that had been set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde ended up in Costa Rica, squandered all the money, got hooked on drugs, and died destitute on May 3 1997.
After Marcos was deposed in 1986, Swiss anthropologist and journalist Oswald Iten, accompanied by Joey Lozano, a journalist from South Cotabato, made an unauthorized investigation to the Tasaday caves and found them deserted. The local tribesmen reported that they had only put on the appearance of living a stone age lifestyle under pressure from Elizalde.
Significant controversy remains over whether the Tasaday tribe was really a hoax, however.
