h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sorry, but you need to go back to Square One on this. The validity of the Tasaday is still very much an open question. Or perhaps I should say it's once again an open question.

Many serious scholars today believe that the original claims in 1971 were not far from the truth. This is the opinion held by most investigators who have spent any time with the Tasaday, and it is the official position of the post-Marcos government in the Phillipines.

It is generally accepted that the two tribesmen who "confessed" to the hoax (and later recanted) were bribed. Why? Many wealthy interests would want to open up 45,000 acres of virgin forest. Even those who doubt the original claims no longer consider the matter a deliberate hoax.

Do a little more research, and this will be a much better article.

RingoZeitgeist is right. The statements appearing in this forum about the Tasaday, on which he comments, like many others that have been posted in various forums, uncritically copies much about the Tasaday that has been copied from the popular media, and chooses to ignore serious scientific investigation that shows that while the Tasaday had not been isolated in the rainforest for thousands of years, they were in fact an isolated ethnolinguistic group who had been living in the rainforest for at least several hundred years. Quotations of supposed comments by Tasaday that they had taken off their clothes at the behest of Manual Elizalde and left their homes in the nearest agricultural village to rush to the caves when visitors were coming were gathered by proponents of the so-called hoax position, and were given by individuals who later said they were paid to say what was wanted... In addition there has been no published statements of what the Tasaday actually said, in their own language, or how it was translated, and into which language. Such comments have absolutely no value as evidence for the veracity of the Tasaday as a distinct, ethnolinguistic group. For evidence that hoax proponents were guilty of such manipulation, see Robin Hemley's "Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday" University of Nebraska Press (2006). I make these statements as someone who approaching the hoax question as a linguist, specializing in Philippine languages for at that time well over 25 years, decided to live with the Tasaday, learn the language they were speaking and compare it in detail with the languages of surrounding communities. The results of these studies have been published in various places, and it would be advisable for those who claim the Tasaday story is a hoax, to first read these materials that show that those who claim the Tasaday are a hoax, are themselves the hoax makers. See [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] also:Reid, Lawrence A. 1992. The Tasaday language: A key to Tasaday prehistory. In The Tasaday controversy: Assessing the evidence, ed. by Thomas N. Headland, 180-193. American Anthropological Association Special Publications, Scholarly Series No. 28. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association. ________ 1996. The Tasaday tapes. In Pan-Asiatic Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, Vol. V:1743-1766. Salaya, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University at Salaya. ________ 1997. Linguistic archaeology: Tracking down the Tasaday language. In Archaeology and language 1: Theoretical and methodological orientations, ed. by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, 184-208. London and New York: Routledge.