Ray Audette writes:

>Just as Stefansson was taken in by the Hunza story in "Cancer Disease of
>Civilization" (and I was taken in by myths of sex on the internet) others
>(including S. Boyd Eaton M.D.)have been influenced by the more recent
>story of the Tsaday in the Philipine Islands.  These turned out to be
>actors hired by the head Anthropologist of the Phillipines (a relative of
>Imelda Marcos).  These "Tsaday" were alleged to be vegetarian gatherers
>but were actually recruited from local farmers.

Actually, the story that the Tasaday were nothing but actors is itself a
huge exaggeration having given rise to myths of its own. Here is an
up-to-date summary of the past controversy over the Tasaday, about which
consensus has now been reached among most scientists that neither the
"modern stone-agers" nor "faked by paid actors" is correct. For those
interested in the full story, here is an excerpt from the book "Traditional
Peoples Today: Continuity and Change in the Modern World," Vol. 5 of the
American Museum of Natural History's "Illustrated History of Humankind"
series. (pp. 74-75). Edited by Goran Burenhult, (c) 1994. HarperCollins:
San Francisco.

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THE TASADAY: STONE AGE CAVE DWELLERS OR THE MOST ELABORATE HOAX IN
SCIENTIFIC HISTORY?

by Thomas N. Headland

IN 1971, NEWS FLASHED AROUND THE WORLD of a band of cave-dwelling people
living deep in the Philippine rainforest. The discovery was made by Manuel
Elizalde, Jr., the head of Panamin, the government agency in charge of
tribal groups. A group of 26 people, the Tasaday, were reportedly following
a Stone Age way of life, surviving solely on wild foods and wearing leaves
for clothing. They knew nothing of the outside world, not even that there
was a large agricultural village just 4 kilometers (less than 3 miles)
away. They neither hunted nor grew food, but ate only what they could
forage: wild bananas, roots, berries, grubs, and crabs and frogs fished by
hand from small streams. They had no pottery, cloth, metal, houses,
weapons, dogs, or domestic plants. Their cave was in dense rainforest in
South Cotabato province, southern Mindanao, at an elevation of 1200 meters
(4000 feet).

The National Geographic Society brought worldwide attention to the
discovery through articles in National Geographic Magazine in December 1971
and August 1972, and its television film on the Tasaday was shown
repeatedly in Europe and America in the course of 1972 and 1973. News
reporter John Nance's bestseller, The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in
the Philippine Rain Forest, spread their fame further in 1975. Journalists,
film makers, and nine scientists were flown in by Panamin to visit the
site, although only one, ethnobotanist Douglas Yen, was able to stay for
more than a few days. (Yen was there for 38 days.) Then, in 1973, the
authorities stopped all contact with the Tasaday, and nothing further was
heard of them for 13 years.

THE 1986 HOAX CLAIM?

In 1986, immediately following the overthrow of Philippine President
Ferdinand Marcos, came reports that the original Tasaday story was a
complete hoax. On 18 March, after an easy hike from a major airport, Swiss
journalist Oswald Iten reached the Tasaday unannounced. He found them
living in houses, growing crops, and wearing clothes.

An hour's walk away, he found their cave, abandoned and overgrown. When, a
week later, reporters from the German magazine Stern flew to the area,
their arrival was notified ahead of time. These reporters filmed the same
Tasaday individuals that Iten had photographed, but now they were living in
the cave and wearing leaves--several with colored underpants showing
underneath. In the following months, hundreds of news articles argued the
case for and against Elizalde having fabricated the whole event.

By the end of the 1980s, the controversy had been reduced to a single
question: were the Tasaday a group of primitive, isolated foragers and a
major anthropological discovery, or simply a giant hoax?

THE CURRENT CONSENSUS

In fact, neither view is correct. By the early 1990s, a general consensus
had emerged. Most scientists had moved away from the opinion that the
Tasaday were totally isolated, offering a genuine glimpse of Stone Age
life. Some of the skeptics had similarly moved from their position that the
Tasaday were simply "paid performers," faking a primitive way of life for
scientists and the media.

Although the 30 scholars actually involved in the controversy in the 1980s
still disagree on many details, all recognize that the Tasaday were not
living as Stone Age foragers. They still disagree as to whether they were
living without iron tools or cultivated foods, and as to what, if any,
contact they had with nearby farming villages. All agree that they are a
genuine minority tribal people who have always lived in the general area
where they were found in 1971.

Disagreement continues, however, as to whether the 26 people (the community
had increased to about 70 in 1986) were a separate ethnic population, or
merely a group from a nearby village of Manobo tribal farmers who were
asked by Panamin officials to dress in leaves and live at the cave site
whenever visitors were flown in. It now seems likely that the Tasaday were
indeed foragers, living similarly to other hunter-gatherers in Southeast
Asia, such as the Negritos. Linguistic analysis of Tasaday speech suggests
that they separated off from a Cotabato Manobo agricultural group
relatively recently-some time in the last century-and moved deeper into the
rainforest to near where they live today, abandoning farming for a
semi-mobile, foraging way of life. They were probably in contact, for trade
and other purposes, with the people in the agricultural village of Blit,
which at the time was just a three-hour walk southwest from the Tasaday
cave.

EIGHT FACTS

Certain evidence that has recently emerged concerning the Tasaday's way of
life before 1970 supports this hypothesis, indicating that journalists and
some scientists exaggerated the Tasaday's primitiveness and led the public
to assume that they were more isolated than they actually were. The
American Anthropological Association's The Tasaday Controversy: Assessing
the Evidence, published in 1992, documents the following eight facts.

The Tasaday were not wearing leaves when they were first encountered in
1971 but commercially manufactured cloth, and it was Elizalde who asked
them to wear leaf G-strings and skirts. They had trade goods before they
were discovered, indicating that they were not out of contact with the
modem world. Before 1971, people in nearby towns were eating meat from wild
game the Tasaday had killed and smoke-dried. The South Cotabato rainforest
lacks sufficient wild plant foods to sustain a foraging group living solely
on wild foods. No one ever observed the Tasaday subsisting from wild foods.
Their bamboo utensils were of cultivated, not wild, bamboo. The stone tools
they were photographed with were fakes. The Tasaday do not speak a separate
language or an unintelligible dialect, but a dialect of the nearby Cotabato
Manobo language.

The story that the Tasaday were a Paleolithic cave people living in
cultural and linguistic isolation from surrounding communities for hundreds
of years is patently false, but it has been established that there was a
small community called the Tasaday who were living as a separate-but not
isolated-group of rainforest hunter-gatherers. Whatever skepticism we may
feel today concerning the early claims of their "primitiveness" and extreme
isolation, they are an indigenous minority people whose lands and rights
should be protected.

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