The Tasaday people lived in caves surrounded by dense forest, on a remote island in the Philippines. They used stone tools for chopping fruit, mashing nuts and splitting any firewood that couldn’t be broken by hand. They had no weapons, and did not hunt animals.
Actually, “animals were their friends” and “they never thought of killing animals for food”. Their main source of meat were frogs that they caught by hand from streams.
I knew all this as a child, and recently came across my old English book from fifth-class in primary school. First published by Fallons in 1974, A New World contained a selection of poems and essays designed to enlighten an 11-year-old’s mind.
One of the articles is titled Cavemen of the 20th Century and gives an account of how, in 1966, a local trapper named Dafal came across a community of cave-dwelling people, untouched by modernity: “It may seem hard to believe that in an age when man walks on the moon there should still be cavemen on this Earth.”
Dafal, it said, visited the Tasaday people 10 times between 1966 and 1971, eventually leading a team of Western anthropologists to the community, arriving by helicopter to document their diet and social customs.
One of the resulting photographs appears in my old schoolbook showing a group of men naked but for loincloths, resting on their hunkers, skinny but not hungry looking. The article reassures us that the members of the tribe “were all in good health and had never known real hunger”.
The story of the Tasadays caught the world’s imagination. Time magazine in 1971 described the Tasaday people as “a lost tribe of Stone Age human beings whose way of life has remained unchanged for aeons”.
In 1972 National Geographic magazine dedicated 32 pages to the tribe. Their cover photo was of a Tasaday child named Lobo hanging on a vine, not unlike an image of Tarzan or of Mowgli in The Jungle Book. Schoolbooks all over the world carried the story, firing the imaginations of millions of children just like me.
On finding my book again, I remembered the effect it had on my boyhood imagination, that such a “gentle, loving people” could exist, and thrive, with little of what we in the West consider necessities.
But it also raised in me a concern. It brought to mind the lyrebird of southeastern Australia that featured in a David Attenborough documentary. It was capable of mimicking not only the calls of other birds, but also the buzz of the chainsaws that were felling its forest home.
I wondered how the Tasadays have managed in the 60 years since their first contact with the outside world. Has modernity changed them? Was their tropical rainforest home destroyed by the advancing sound of chainsaws? A consultation with Google provided deflating, but instructive, answers.
It was a hoax.
Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines in 1965-1986. His regime promoted the Tasaday people as a kind of living museum exhibit: proof of an ancient, unbroken Filipino past that bolstered his government’s territorial claims over the Sabah state of Malaysia.
The “Stone Age Tasadays” narrative also diverted international attention away from human rights abuses. In 1972 the regime declared the 19,000 acres surrounding the Tasaday ancestral caves a nature reserve, closing it to outsiders, including journalists. This was ostensibly to protect the Tasaday people and their tribal terrain from loggers, but in time it facilitated land-grabbing and resource exploitation in the area.
In 1986, as the Marcos regime fell and martial law was lifted, Swiss anthropologist Oswald Iten took the opportunity to enter the region. He found the same family that had been “living” in the caves two decades earlier, now living in a traditional bamboo hut, wearing T-shirts and even smoking cigarettes. The caves were empty, and Lobo recreated his “swinging on the vine” photo – wearing blue jeans.
Iten reported how there hadn’t been a Tasaday people; they were simply members of other known local tribes who has posed as a primitive community under pressure from the Marcos regime.
“Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed,” one member of the community told Iten. “We took off our clothes because [Manuel] Elizalde [a government official] told us to do so and promised if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasadays and promised us security from counterinsurgency and tribal fighting.”
Elizalde amassed millions of dollars in charitable donations and research funds that were intended for the Tasaday community, and left the Philippines. Little of what was promised to the people in the photos was delivered.
The “Tasaday” people today are modern indigenous agriculturalists who are integrated into mainstream Philippine society. They wear cotton clothing, farm rice and root crops and hunt animals for meat.
And as for us schoolchildren, being reared on stories of modern-day cavemen – at least it taught us that there’s nothing new in fake news.