The Tasaday: Stone-Age Cavemen of the Philippines

EARLY IN AUGUST 1971, a helicopter took off from Davao Airport on Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines, carrying four passengers and two crew. Its flight plan was vague—the pilot merely informed the control tower that they were headed “southwest” into the island’s interior. Only powerful government officials could get away with keeping their flight plans secret. This helicopter was under the command of Manuel Elizalde Jr., head of the Philippine Ministry for National Minorities, and a close personal friend of Philippine President Marcos himself.

Wearing his trademark crumpled white yachting cap at a jaunty angle, Elizalde looked almost bored, but the other passengers—an American journalist and two American cameramen working for the National Geographic Society—could barely contain their excitement. They were going to be the first to document one of the most astonishing discoveries of the 20th century.

A month earlier, the Philippine government had made a stunning announcement: one of its agents had stumbled across a small tribe of 27 primitive cavemen, hidden deep in the Mindanao jungle.

Known as the Tasaday (taw-saw-day), these 7 men, 6 women, and 14 children were still living in caves as their ancestors had done thousands of years ago. They had never ventured out to the coast, had never encountered modern society, and still used only stone and bamboo tools. They wore loincloths made of leaves or grass, didn’t hunt or fish, and ate only foods they could gather—wild fruit, yams, tadpoles or frogs, palm pith, and worms.

The news caused an uproar all over the world. This was like being able to travel back all the way to the Stone Age without using a time machine.

The find was especially exciting for the world’s anthropologists and paleontologists—scientists who spent their careers trying to unlock the secrets of how our ancestors lived and evolved. Without live ancestors to talk to, they had to piece history together by patiently examining little bits of bone and fossils and trying to imagine how people and animals back then had looked and functioned. The process involved a lot of guesswork and could be very frustrating, because you could never really be sure your assumptions were right. So the opportunity to talk to 27 living, breathing cavemen still living exactly like our ancestors lived was simply mind-blowing.

Needless to say, the Philippine government was swamped with requests to meet, interview, photograph, and study the Tasaday. The requests came not only from scientists, but also from many newspaper and television journalists.

A lot of journalists didn’t even bother trying to get permission. They just threw some clothes into a bag and grabbed the next available flight to Davao Airport, hoping to hire local guides to take them to the Tasaday.

Many of them had no idea what they were up against. The Tasaday caves were hidden in a mostly unmapped part of southwestern Mindanao. To get there by land you had to bounce and skid and plow your way through long stretches of rainforest by jeep, over very rough logging roads. These roads ended in small villages at the edge of the jungle, after which you still had to spend another week hacking and smashing your way through the jungle’s almost impenetrable tangle of vines and brush.

Even if you managed to get that far, there was a final obstacle to overcome—an army of native warriors hired by Manuel Elizalde Jr. to keep people from getting into the Tasaday’s territory.

Elizalde had made it clear that he wasn’t about to have the Tasaday overrun by anybody—not loggers, not miners, and not western scientists or journalists. Anybody who wanted the privilege of studying the Tasaday had to file a proper petition, then get in line and wait. Elizalde said that the petitions would be evaluated on the basis of their scientific value and importance to humanity.

This concern was something about Elizalde that a lot of people found hard to understand. Elizalde was the son of a rich and influential Philippine family. Until a few years before he had never shown the slightest interest in native issues—or, for that matter, any selfless causes. He was very smart and could be very charming, but he could also be aggressive, rude, and careless. He drank a lot and was known as a party animal. A lot of people felt he’d been given his government appointment mostly because of his many political friends.

At the same time, he’d surprised people. Even though his family owned large mining and logging companies in the Philippines, he’d come out strongly against the invasion by such companies into areas inhabited not just by the Tasaday, but by native tribes all over the Philippines.

What everybody agreed on was that Elizalde liked money. Lots of money. Truckloads of money. He spent it recklessly. He was always roaring around in government helicopters and expensive jeeps. His ministry always seemed to be on the verge of bankruptcy, and some people said it was because Elizalde spent its money like a drunken sailor. (His crumpled white yachting cap didn’t help that image.)

And then there was the preservation fund. Within days of announcing the discovery of the Tasaday, Elizalde established a Tasaday Preservation Fund that immediately began accepting donations. Even though Elizalde had said that access to the Tasaday would be judged on scientific value, it quickly became obvious that he was using a different measure—the size of one’s donation. Somehow, if you couldn’t afford to give a big donation, the scientific value of your petition quickly faded away.

Scientists and academics without a lot of money couldn’t get their phone calls returned. Even scientists and journalists who actually lived in the Philippines were being ignored.

On the other hand, donations reportedly ranging from a quarter of a million to half a million dollars from rich television networks like America’s NBC and Germany’s NDR, and from newspaper and magazine publishers like The New York Times, Life Magazine, and National Geographic, quickly moved these petitioners to the head of the line.

Back in the helicopter, the Americans watched the jungle stretching like a solid green carpet on all sides. It was so densely treed that they couldn’t imagine where the helicopter might land. About an hour after take-off the pilot began checking his instruments more often, and a few minutes later he put the aircraft into a steep dive. Soon they were hovering directly above the trees—and that’s when the journalists realized how they were going to “land.”

Bulldozing a clearing for a helicopter pad would have been a dead giveaway for the Tasaday’s location, so Elizalde had brought in a team of Tboli natives with ropes and chainsaws to build a cunningly hidden landing platform—right in the top of an oak tree 45 meters (150 feet) high.

With the helicopter thundering above the platform, the three Americans were lowered one at a time in a basket. By the time Elizalde joined them, they were already beginning to feel seasick from the platform’s dipping and swaying. Their gear followed in a small cargo net, and as it hit the platform a camera bag spilled out and began to skid. Before anyone could grab it, it slid right over the platform’s edge and plunged, disappearing through the green leaf cover.

It seemed like forever before they finally heard the tiny tinkle of its crash on the forest floor below.

Fortunately there was no wind—though later crews would report white-knuckling descents down a rope ladder that swung wildly in high winds.

Below the jungle’s leafy canopy the brilliant sunlight was replaced by an eery, soft green gloom. At the bottom of the ladder a Tboli guide dressed only in a loincloth stood waiting. Elizalde climbed down first, easily and quickly. As the Americans followed, the branches of nearby trees caught on their packs and clothes, so they had to move slowly, placing their hands and feet very carefully. When everyone had regrouped and shouldered their gear, the guide waved at them all to follow.

For an hour or more the party padded along a faint trail, climbing and ducking through tangles of rattan, bamboo, and vines. The jungle was dark and humid. Occasional shafts of sunlight stabbed downward whenever the trees above them shifted their crowns. Everyone but the Tboli guide found it hard to keep his footing on the slippery ground. The Americans stumbled often over ankle-high roots.

But what they found when they reached the Tasaday caves was even more wonderful than they’d been led to expect.

The Tasaday caves were rugged and dusty, but the Tasaday lived there quite happily. They greeted everyone with hugs and sniff-kisses—especially Elizalde, who handed out small packets of cookies and salt. Once the greetings were over, the Tasaday cleared a space around the fire and invited their visitors to join them in a special feast of live tadpoles and grubs dipped in palm pith.

Over the next several days, the journalists found themselves increasingly charmed and impressed by their Stone Age hosts. The Tasaday lived the kind of life that most people around the world could only dream of—a life of complete peace, contentment, and harmony. They didn’t have words in their language for “weapons,” “enemies,” or “war.” Everybody seemed to get along with everybody else. Younger children were constantly being patted, nuzzled, and praised. Men and women lived as equals, with no class structure—the Tasaday didn’t even seem to have a leader. Everyone’s opinions and suggestions around the campfire were treated with equal respect. There was always much singing and laughter, with children fearlessly swinging on long vines and scurrying up and down tree trunks with amazing agility.

National Geographic rushed its first photo article about the Tasaday into print several months later (“First Glimpse of a Stone Age Tribe”). CBS broadcast a follow-up National Geographic documentary (“The Last Tribes of the Mindanao”) in January of 1972. Being two of the largest and most reputable media outlets, their stories reached a huge audience.

People the world over fell in love with the Tasaday. They adored the photographs of naked Tasaday cave mothers nursing and cuddling their babies, and wide-eyed Tasaday children gazing at the camera with cute bewilderment. The documentary proved to be one of the society’s all-time greatest hits. “The Tasaday have given the world a new measure for man,” enthused one of its editors. “If our ancient ancestors were like the Tasaday, we come of far better stock than I thought.”

Other journalists Elizalde took to meet the Tasaday had similar experiences. The Tasaday, they reported, had learned how to live their lives in an almost perfect balance. By working together as a group they were able to reduce the boredom of food-gathering to a few hours a day; the rest were spent singing, telling stories, just goofing around, or sleeping. The children grew up without stress or pressure, and were well behaved. They were also very comfortable around adults, and didn’t separate themselves off into groups or cliques.

Anthropologists were fascinated (and also puzzled) to discover that, unlike most other primitive peoples, the Tasaday seemed to feel no need to create cave paintings or make musical instruments. Instead of making pottery or mats or cloth—although there was plenty of raw material around—they just ate and drank out of their cupped hands, boiled water in hollowed-out bamboo sticks, and covered their genitals with leaves kept in place by vines.

Another thing that was curious was that the Tasaday brewed no alcoholic drinks, and didn’t smoke or chew tobacco. This was really unusual. Anthropologists had never encountered a people who didn’t practice at least one of those habits.

Then there was the matter of religious traditions. The Tasaday didn’t seem to have any. They married, but didn’t perform big marriage celebrations. Each man took only one wife (though they indicated they wouldn’t mind having more wives if more became available). When people died, they were simply buried in shallow unmarked graves without ceremony. When asked if they believed in an afterlife, a heaven, or a hell, the Tasaday looked confused. The questions didn’t make any sense to them.

They also worshipped no gods or prophets—although their ancestors had promised them that someday, if they stayed patiently in their forest, a Good Person would come to them, bringing much joy and good fortune. That person, the Tasaday had decided, was Manuel Elizalde Jr., whom they called “Momo Bong” (Divine Being), and it was this belief that always gave his visits a special meaning for them. It also explained why they didn’t seem to want to have any direct contact with outsiders, even after they’d become aware that other native tribes—the Tboli and the Blit—lived only a few days’ walk through the jungle from their caves. In any dealings with non-Tasadays, they always chose Elizalde as their spokesman and go-between.

As the stories and reports multiplied, so did calls for greater protection for the Tasaday against the advancing logging and mining companies. When Elizalde launched his Tasaday Preservation Fund, many prominent western environmentalists and politicians joined him to help raise money. Even the aging Charles Lindbergh, America’s most famous pilot, joined the fight. Following a visit to the Tasaday, he pronounced them “the keepers of an ancient wisdom that modern man has almost forgotten.”

When President Marcos announced a year later that he was setting aside a 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) section of the Tasaday jungle as a protected native reserve, he was cheered and applauded around the world.

For three years a steady stream of journalists and scientists visited the Tasaday—but always for only a few hours at a time, and always accompanied by Elizalde. Then, in 1974, Elizalde abruptly cancelled all further access to them. He said he was afraid they might accidentally catch modern diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, or polio. He also claimed that the Tasadays were finding the interviews too exhausting, and that their lives were becoming distorted by too much contact with modern people.

But by then a virtual “Tasaday industry” had developed, and was flourishing in schools and universities all over the world. In 1975 the first full-length Tasaday book appeared, entitled The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest, by the American journalist John Nance. Other books, and hundreds of reports and scientific papers, followed.

Scholars and scientists studying the Tasaday began to question many of the assumptions they had made about how people in the Stone Age used to live. Maybe, for example, our ancestors weren’t necessarily as aggressive and warlike as we assumed. Maybe our popular image of Stone Age man as a hairy hulk with apelike arms, whose method of proposing marriage was to grab his chosen woman by the hair and drag her into his cave—maybe this was all nonsense.

Many conferences and seminars were held, and some scholars began to revise the books and textbooks they’d written about the Stone Age. The well-spoken and Harvard-educated Elizalde became a popular speaker on the academic lecture circuit. Even the world-famous Smithsonian Institute invited him to Washington to speak about the Tasaday.

During all this time, a few renegade journalists and academics had steadfastly refused to go along with the excitement.

These protesters—many of them people who had been refused access to the Tasaday—simply didn’t trust Elizalde, or any project he was associated with. They felt he was just using the Tasaday to get a lot of media attention for himself. They accused him of playing the role of “big daddy” to the Philippine aboriginal community.

And anyway, what was he doing with the millions of dollars that were being donated by western media corporations and environmentalists to his Tasaday Preservation Fund?

Others challenged the very idea that the Tasaday were Stone Age people. They asked how a tribe of so few people could have survived so long without obvious signs of inbreeding.

A dietitian wondered how the Tasaday were even managing to stay alive on a daily calorie intake that was lower than the generally accepted level for basic survival.

A Filipino linguist felt the Tasaday language was too similar to the dialects of the region’s Tboli and Manobo tribes to have remained isolated for thousands of years. He even claimed he’d overheard two Tasaday men in private conversation using words that sounded oddly like “cement,” “house roof,” and “pickup truck”!

And why had Elizalde kept all the interviews with the Tasaday so short? Why had he monitored them so carefully, and even tried to control what scientists had written about the Tasaday?

Elizalde dismissed all these objections as sour grapes. They were simply the complaints of grumblers who were jealous of his and the Tasaday’s worldwide popularity. If they couldn’t live with that, it was their problem.

The world’s love affair with the Tasaday continued.

By the early 1980s the location of the Tasaday was no longer much of a secret, but Elizalde’s army continued to provide an effective defense against all unauthorized entry into their territory. But when Philippine Opposition Leader Benigno Aquino was murdered in 1983, and the Marcos government was suspected of being involved, Marcos’s regime began to crumble. It wasn’t long before Elizalde’s army—which had been paid by the Philippine government—began to crumble too.

A Swiss journalist by the name of Oswald Iten was one of the first to hear these political rumors in early 1986. Known as a radical, Iten loved to tangle with governments and their institutions. He had already been jailed several times for going into countries where he wasn’t welcome. Sensing a scoop, he caught a flight to Davao airport, where he linked up with a local journalist named Joey Lozano. Lozano knew how to get to the Tasaday caves.

The two men managed to make their way through the rainforest to the edge of the Mindanaoan jungle—becoming the first people to manage an unauthorized entry into the Tasaday reserve.

When they arrived at the caves, however, they were startled by what they found.

The caves were empty.

The Tasaday had disappeared.

This was a puzzle. It was widely said that the Tasaday never strayed far from their caves. The two men looked around and then began investigating in earnest.

Their second discovery was that, despite supposedly having lived in these caves since the Stone Age, the Tasaday appeared to have produced very little evidence of ever having lived there. No old or broken tools lying around. No garbage. No forgotten or abandoned personal possessions.

Their third discovery was a trail, camouflaged near the caves but well defined farther along. It led toward the village of Blit at the jungle’s edge.

In Blit, the journalists were in for an even bigger surprise. They were told that the Tasaday often came out of the jungle to visit the village—and that they often ate at the village’s foodstalls. “Manda [Elizalde] gives them money,” a Blit native told Iten.

“There are no Tasaday anyway,” another scoffed. “That’s just an invented name. It means mountain or something.”

But Iten’s biggest discovery came several days later when the two reporters finally found the last piece of the puzzle.

They found many of the alleged Stone-Agers living in a scattering of frame huts just inside the jungle. They were wearing Harley-Davidson T-shirts, Nike sneakers, and Levi jeans.

They were also wearing watches and smoking cigarettes.

The Tasaday, it turned out, were nothing more than local natives who had been convinced by Elizalde to pose as prehistoric cave dwellers. “Manda told us if we went naked and were nice to the foreigners, we’d get money because we looked poor,” one of them explained. “We only went to the caves when Manda brought in the foreigners. When they flew away, we went back home.”

Oswald Iten hurried home and gave the story to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuricher Zeitung. Its three-page story on April 12, 1986 was headlined “Steinzeitschwindel!” (Stone Age Scam!). Two days later the Reuters news agency picked up the story and sent it around the world.

British and American television crews, including journalists from ABC’s investigative program 20/20, quickly followed Iten’s trail. They confirmed the whole bizarre story.

Manuel Elizalde Jr., it appeared, had cooked up the Tasaday scam largely as a fund-raising device to fatten up the bank accounts of his Ministry for National Minorities. For a while, as the first millions poured into the Tasaday Preservation Fund, he had even used some of the funds to benefit the natives under his care, providing food and military protection against the local militias and outlaw logging companies who were threatening to overrun them from all sides.

But once Ferdinand Marcos’s government began to fall apart and Elizalde realized that he would probably be exposed, he forgot all about his promises. He couldn’t face the humiliation, the likelihood of years in jail, or the poverty. Maybe Elizalde really had cared about the native people of the Philippines at one time, but now he cared about himself a lot more.

And so, late in 1983, Manuel Elizalde Jr. had helped himself to the money in his ministry’s bank accounts and the Tasaday Preservation Fund—variously estimated at 150 to 250 million dollars—and bought himself an airline ticket to Costa Rica. Costa Rica had no extradition treaty with the Republic of the Philip-pines, so the Philippines police wouldn’t be able to bring him back.

World media reaction to Elizalde’s caper was predictably selective. Most of the large newspaper or television corporations that had been fooled by Elizalde were too embarrassed to give the story front-page coverage. Many of them gave it no coverage at all. Their smaller, poorer competitors, on the other hand, were happy to give the story lots of attention, and to point out how thoroughly the large corporations had been scammed.

It was much the same within the academic community. Those scientists who had been most deeply involved and whose reputations were most at risk generally worked hardest at damage control. And in 1988, the American Anthropological Society used its annual general meeting to host a special inquiry into “The Tasaday Controversy.” Its members split hairs, argued over definitions and spouted jargon until the issue had become so impenetrable, they couldn’t decide one way or the other. So they did what they always did when they couldn’t agree: called for more study and set up another committee.

Manuel Elizalde Jr. was never brought to justice—but maybe justice found him anyway. After living the high life in Costa Rica for about ten years, Elizalde reportedly became addicted to crack cocaine and ended up squandering his fortune.

He died penniless in 1997—even poorer than the “Tasaday” natives he had used so effectively to con the world.