The Lost Tribe of the Tasaday’s
I was stationed in the Northern Island of the Philippines, (Luzon) in 1972 at Clark AFB. and I remember hearing about the Tasaday tribe quite well. The previous year a discovery was made that fired up the world of anthropology like nothing else ever had. The discovery of a cave-dwelling tribe called the Tasaday Tribe. They were discovered living naked in caves using stone age tools. It was such a huge discovery that National Geographic ran special articles on the tribe’s people. A cadre of scientists along with the rich and famous traveled to the Philippines just to see these primitives. Journalists and their publishers couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Books were written, television specials were run all filled with explanations on how this tribe lived, what they ate and on and on.
Check it out for yourself: Here is the actual article from Time Magazine archives dated Oct. 1971.
But like so many fairy tales, they sometimes end badly. And this one only had one problem–it was all an act, set up to raise money.
The scientific world had rushed in and took the bait–hook, line and sinker! Like they did with Eoanthropus dawsoni, aka: Piltdown Man.
Supposedly it all unraveled when a missionary had recognized some of the tribes people from one of those magazine articles he’d read. It was a group he’d worked with and knew they weren’t living in caves, nor were naked…(those nasty christians, always interfering with science!).As it turned out a minor Philippine official by the name of Manuel Elizalde Jr., paid local farmers to live in the caves, take off their clothes, and appear Stone Age. They even rehearsed using stone impliments. Unfortunately Manuel Elizalde Jr. absconded with a large bankroll of money taken from funds set aside to provide lands for the Tasaday’s themselves.Here’s one of the remaining articles I’ve found about what really happened. You can research it for yourself and read numerous articles about this fraud…but sometimes the truth is hard to swallow, (especially when you have a group that gets funding for perpetuating the lie).
Not to be confused with the facts of the case, some “scientists” still cling to the theory that the Tasaday are a stone age people co-opted by the modern world.
My wife and I frequently go to Hawaii and visit our son and daughter in law who live there. We’ve met these Polynesian Americans– who run a cultural center at Kualoa Ranch’s Macadamia Nut Farm. When attired in native costume, it’s not difficult to imagine them paddling in dugouts between islands. I would like to see what Darwin would have written about them had the HMS Beagle put into port there. Chief Sieulu and staff there at Kualoa are fluent in a number of languages, intelligent, well traveled, funny and know how to entertain, plus I think he drives a beamer. The Chief’s survival skills are unsurpassed! He can shell a coconut in seconds, make fire in a minute and play the drums. (If you go to O’ahu Hawaii I recommend you go to the Kualoa Macadamia Nut Farm and take the tour!) Darwin’s writings were applied to reinforce their long history of racist ideas, now cloaked in the name of science. To classify some men as more evolved and superior than others, unfortunately led to the deaths of many who were considered less than human such as the Australian Aboriginal people. See Evolution and Racism.
Big R's World 
You write with great anger. What did Darwin ever do to you to deserve such calumny?
Great anger? Hmmm, could you be specific?
The ranting against scientists, as if it wasn’t scientists who exposed the problems with the story; the erroneous claims that Darwin’s writings were racist and encouraged deaths of aboriginals, when he wrote exactly the opposite.
I’m assuming you’re not just recklessly disregarding the facts, but that you’re really ticked at something to the point you’ve not checked for accuracy.
For example, you could have done a Google search:
http://www.tasaday.com/
Thanks for your comments Ed Darrell. I’ve got no problems with scientists at all. Science itself is in many ways a gift of Christianity. What I’m focusing in on here is the scientist who has a vested interest in specific ‘evidence’ that he or she extracts in order to further those vested interests. The sad tale of the Tasaday is but one of those so called finds that some ‘scientists’ tenaciously cling to either because of the embarrassment they would suffer to abandon their claims or the grant money they would loose if they faced up to the facts of the case. Just because a person is a well known scientist doesn’t mean that they are immune to the draws of fame and fortune. It’s for that reason I wonder what your interest was in promoting certain science textbooks that are being used beginning in Texas schools.
Did you know that:
1. In 1986 ABC-TV presented a story on the hoax entitled “The Tribe That Never Was,” and
2. “Scandal: The Lost Tribe,” was shown on NBC-TV in 1987, both revealing how the scientific community had been duped.
So that begs the question; why do some hold to a proven hoax as a scientific discovery? Echoes of Piltdown Man?
Piltdown Man? You’d have done well to stick with the scientists on that one, too — they were skeptical to begin with, didn’t incorporate it into the texts because it didn’t fit any theory, and ultimately the scientists uncovered the fraud.
In this case, there were groups who objected to the reservation of land for the Tasaday, groups that did their best to get the reservation cancelled in order to get at the forests in the reservation, to cut them down for lumber.
So, the hoax appears to be a hoax. Among other things, recent research, and research done all along, indicates clearly that the Tasaday are linguistically different. Unless one thinks one could invent a language that experts could not detect as artificial for 40 years, and then teach it to 100 people who could accurately follow the language rules for 40 years without once slipping up, there’s the solid evidence that the original story was accurate.
That is all covered on the one site I noted to you. If you did the Google search you should have found a dozen other sites, at least. If you did a search in the journals, you’d find articles as recent as 2007 noting the Tasaday as a lost tribe, found.
So, just as with Piltdown, you’d have done well to stick with the scientists. But in the Tasaday case, the hoax was done by those who wanted to get the forests cut down, and who perpetrated the hoax that the Tasaday were not Tasaday.
Thanks for your response Mr. Darrell.
Piltdown Man was in textbooks. http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/13anc08.htm
Scientists promoted Piltdown man as an intermediate link. !n 1925 the ACLU canvassed for a teacher to challenge the legality of the state of Tennessee’s ban on the teaching of evolution and even used Piltdown man as evidence at the Scopes trial. Interestingly it was a lawyer, (now it makes sense) Samuel Woodhead, who is believed to have been complicit with Charles Dawson in creating the fossil in the first place.
While Piltdown was found to be a fraud, it remained in textbooks and encyclopedia’s for years afterward. Scientists discovered the hoax – primarily because it “interfered” with other fossil discoveries. One could speculate that if Piltdown had been crafted better to agree with other fossils to be found later, scientists might still regard him as an early stage of man. http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Eoanthropus+dawsoni