Tasaday

The Tasaday are a group of people who inhabited the rainforests of Mindanao in the Philippines. They first came to international attention in 1971 when they were "discovered" by Filipino journalist Manuel Elizalde Jr., who claimed they were a Stone Age society living in isolation. Elizalde portrayed the Tasaday as a gentle, primitive people with a unique culture and language, untouched by modern civilization. He established a reservation for them and worked to protect their way of life.

Over the following years, numerous researchers and journalists visited the Tasaday, and their story captured the global imagination. However, doubts about the Tasaday's isolation began to emerge in the 1980s. Anthropologists and journalists raised questions about the extent of their isolation, suggesting that they may have had contact with other ethnic groups before their "discovery." Some evidence indicated that the Tasaday were not as primitive as initially presented and that their story might have been influenced by outside narratives.

Further investigations and research have led to a consensus among many anthropologists that the Tasaday's story as a completely isolated Stone Age society was likely a fabrication or at least significantly exaggerated. It is now widely believed that the Tasaday were a small group of people who lived in relative seclusion but had some level of interaction with neighboring communities. The circumstances surrounding their discovery and the subsequent narrative have been a subject of ongoing debate and a significant case study in anthropology regarding issues of cultural representation, media influence, and the ethics of anthropological fieldwork.