Lost people were revealed as ‘rainforest clock punchers’

Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos announced the anthropological find of the 20th century — a tale of noble savages to distract the world from his regime’s unsavoury practices.

A young member of the Tasaday tribe, a Philippine indigenous people of the Lake Sebu area in Mindanao.

It was 50 years this week that Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos announced the anthropological find of the 20th century – a lost tribe of Stone Age cave-dwellers deep in the country’s forests, who wore leaves for clothes, gathered food from the jungle and had no contact with the outside world.

Returning to Manila to challenge the corrupt Marcos, long-exiled opposition leader Benigno Aquino fitted a bulletproof jacket under his shirt, joking that there might be someone out there waiting to shoot him. There was. A minute later he was dead on the tarmac.

The assassination on August 21, 1983, famously ignited the chain of events that resulted in the 1986 revolution that restored democracy to the country. In tandem, this led to another series of developments that would unravel one of the great deceptions of the 20th century. There was an early clue: days after the Aquino murder, and with Marcos’s grip on his country fatally weakened, a crony of the president, Manuel Elizalde, fled to Costa Rico.

He’s almost forgotten now, but Elizalde was one of the best known industrialists and philanthropists in the Philippines (although his credentials as a good Samaritan would come under question). His companies embraced mining, tin-plate manufacturing, paint and real estate, and he owned a distillery.

Early in 1971 a business acquaintance told Elizalde of a small, isolated tribe other locals had described as living near Lake Sebu.

Reportedly Elizalde was able to influence the Marcos government to keep tariffs on imports so he could manipulate prices and exploit scarcity. But he apparently had a softer side: Elizalde also ran a quasi-government organisation known as the Presidential Assistance on National Minorities (Panamin), which set out to protect the country’s 70 or so cultural minorities.

The Harvard-educated son of one of his country’s wealthier families, Elizalde and his wife adopted 50 children from poor tribes, but the pair made enemies as they fought to protect tribal lands from loggers and others who would exploit their forests. Cynics thought otherwise, and with good reason. A comprehensive Human Rights Watch report in 1996 stated: Under Elizalde, Panamin forced thousands of tribal people into “strategic hamlets”, ostensibly to protect them from the fighting, but often in practice to give Elizalde free rein to pursue his logging and mining interests.

Early in 1971 a business acquaintance told Elizalde of a small, isolated tribe other locals had described as living near Lake Sebu, an area of dense, old-growth forest on the northern tip of Mindanao. This small group, perhaps fewer than 30 people, apparently lived a simple life little advanced from prehistory. As a young man, Elizalde had been quite the Manila playboy, and he had not lost his instinct for publicity. He could see international headlines in this “lost tribe”.

In the 1970s, Marcos fabricated tales of the Tasaday, supposedly a Stone Age tribe living in Mindanao. The hoax fooled Filipinos and the world. Picture: John Nance

Organising a small team – including his bodyguard, a doctor and a translator from the nearby village of Blit – Elizalde took a helicopter to the site and landed at a site that had been cleared for them. They met a small group dressed in palm and orchid leaves who took them to the caves in which they lived and from which they gathered jungle foods and tadpoles, but from which they never strayed, believing themselves, until very recently, to be the only people on the planet.

This was huge news and the Tasaday, as they were called, were romantically portrayed as a noble, uncorrupted lot whose language (largely overlapped by the local Manobo dialect) did not include words for “enemy”, “war” or “violence”. If only these hidden hippies had been found two years earlier, they’d have been stars at Woodstock.

National Geographic’s August 1972 cover.

“They didn’t realise there was a sea,” said Elizalde. “They did not even know what rice was.”

The New York Times was enthusiastic, reporting “this little group in the southernmost island of the Philippines is living at one of the earliest stages of man’s development, probably never before encountered in such classic form”.

In August 1972 the Tasaday made the front cover of National Geographic magazine, which contained 32 pages about their primitive, gentle ways.

Soon after, the Philippines government did two things: it declared martial law, effectively making Marcos a dictator; and it sealed off almost 200sq km of the Tasaday’s ancestral valleys to keep visitors out.

Except the newsworthy. In an effort to soften the image of the divided nation, Imelda Marcos invited Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida in to photograph the Tasaday as part of a book on the Philippines. Legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh was also given access. Such exotic reports about the lost tribe helped keep attention away from the Marcoses’ totalitarian brutality.

Of course, scientists and anthropologists were excluded, until Marcos fled the Philippines in February 1986. The first visitor to the Tasaday whose trip was not stage-managed was Swiss journalist Oswald Iten who, without too much difficulty, walked into the forest to meet them weeks later.

Manuel Elizalde with a member of the Tasaday tribe.

Members of the tribe, dressed in worn T-shirts and jeans, looked at the National Geographic photographs from 15 years earlier and laughed as they recognised themselves. An elder, Bilangan, explained: “We didn’t live in the caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde. Elizalde forced us to live in those caves so we’d be called cavemen.”

One anthropologist dismissed the tribe as “rainforest clock punchers – cave people by day and went home to their families at night”, and Elizalde did indeed send teams out to “prep” the locals for the following day’s visits.

It had been a hoax after all, but the exploited Tasaday were real enough. They had regularly encountered and traded with other local tribes, but at some point they had splintered from the main group and, over the course of perhaps 100 years or so, their language had evolved, as had a significant accent. They lived separately, but never in isolation.

Elizalde, who was expelled from Costa Rica in a campaign to rid the country of “scoundrels”, returned to Manila in late 1986 and almost made a remarkable return to public life, being nominated by then president Fidel Ramos as ambassador to Mexico in 1993. After noisy protests about Elizalde’s connection to Marcos this was dropped. He died in May 1997, never retreating from his claims of having found the lost tribe.