Tasaday: A Naked Lie

                                Tasaday cave men, 1972 (Source: http://www.tasaday.com/Site/Home.html)
 
  It was an anthropologist's dream.  The head of the Philippine agency for national minorities, Manuel Elizalde, Jr., announce to the world in 1971 that a tribe of Stone Age people, never exposed to modern civilization, had been discovered in the jungle.
     Wearing loincloths made of orchid leaves, the Tasaday, as they were called, lived in caves, subsisting on grubs, small aquatic life and wild fruits and vegetables.  They did not farm and had no method for keeping time.  They used no weapons and had no word for war.
     The news excited scientists and journalists.  A platform was built int he rain forest to help helicopters ferry observers in and out.  The cave men became media darlings.
      National Geographic devoted a cover story to the Tasaday, and NBC television offered Elizalde $50,000 to let them produce a documentary on the cave men.  In the meantime, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos made the Tasaday's region a government preserve.
     It wasn't until 1986 , when the Marcos regime was ousted, that a Swiss journalists revisited the mysterious people.  He was stunned to find the erstwhile cave dwellers living in huts. dressed in T-shirts and shorts.  The journalists said they told him they had been instructed by Elizalde to pretend to be cave men.
     Today most anthropologists do not dispute thatbthe Tasaday's cave life, limited diet and isolation were all falsified, probably at the behest of Elizalde.  Many surmised that it had been a ploy to exploit the region's natural resources.

Reference: Reader's Digest (Feb. 1998)