Isolated Philippine natives discovered by Manuel Elizalde in 1971. The Tasaday were a small tribe of 24 people living on the Philippine island of Mindanao. They were so isolated from the 20th century that they believed that they were the only people living in the world. They practiced a Stone Age culture, knew nothing of agriculture, and wore only primitive loincloths made from local plants. The Tasaday were first discovered in June 1971 by a hunter from a nearby tribe, who persuaded them to meet Elizalde. Elizalde worked for the Philippine government as an advisor on national minorities under Ferdinand Marcos. He brought the Tasaday to public notice through skillful use of the media, including the influential magazine National Geographic. The organization filmed the Tasaday in a National Geographic special, “The Lost Tribes of Mindanao,” in December, 1971.
Elizalde cut off contact with the Tasaday in the mid- 1970s, claiming that the Tasaday were being corrupted by the media deluge. Once the Marcos regime was over-thrown in the 1980s, however, journalists began to try to reestablish contact with the tribe. A Swiss writer named Oswald Iten, who had written extensively about small cultural groups, visited the sites the Tasaday had frequented. He claimed that he found them deserted and that the local people including members of the original Tasaday, whom he photographed in modern dress told him that the Tasaday were really members of the Manubo-Blit tribe whom Elizalde had persuaded to masquerade as a Stone Age tribe for the cameras. Iten concluded that Elizalde engineered the discovery of the Tasaday for the sake of publicity and that the Tasaday themselves were a great hoax.