3. The Tasaday Turn Out to Be a Fraud
As Manuel Elizalde described the Tasaday: “They didn’t realize there was a country. They didn’t realize there was a sea beyond Mindanao. … they did not even know what rice was.” They were also complete pacifists: “They have no words for weapons, hostility, or war“. Overnight, the Tasaday went from unknown to globally famous. Their pictures graced the covers of magazines, including National Geographic. Clips of the tribe were featured on news programs, numerous documentaries were made about the stone age denizens of the jungle, and a bestselling book, The Gentle Tasaday, was written about them. Celebrities flocked to visit and be photographed with them. However, when professional anthropologists sought to study them, the Tasaday and their region were abruptly declared off-limits by Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
It was not until 1986, after the Marcos regime was toppled, that the truth finally came out: the Tasaday stone age story was a fraud. Once journalists and anthropologists gained access to the tribe, they discovered that, far from being primitive stone agers, they lived like modern people in houses, not in caves. They did not run around naked and barefoot, but wore shirts, jeans, flip-flops and shoes. Interviews revealed that Elizalde had pressured them into pretending to be stone age primitives. As to Elizalde? He had set up a charitable foundation which raised millions of dollars to protect the Tasaday, their “way of life”, and their jungle habitat from encroachment by the outside world. In 1983, he fled the Philippines, after stealing millions from the foundation.