The Tasaday—Are They a “Stone Age” People?
By “Awake!” correspondent in the Philippines
“A MODERN relic of the Stone Age”; “The most primitive human beings so far discovered”; “The first known living ‘cavemen.’” Through such newspaper reports, worldwide attention was focused on a twenty-five-member tribe living in the dense jungle of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Their discovery led to the forming of several expeditions composed of Filipino and American anthropologists, news correspondents, television crews of the National Geographic Society, a cabinet minister of the Philippine government, and an American conservationist, the late Charles A. Lindbergh.
Why should such a small group of people as the Tasaday attract such unprecedented interest and attention? What makes them so special? Can modern, civilized society learn anything from this tiny primitive band?
Discovering the Forest People
Discovery of the Tasaday was quite accidental. Sometime in 1966, a hunter from a town at the forest’s edge stumbled upon them while laying his wild-pig traps deep in the mountains of South Cotabato. Following a trail of strange footprints, he came upon three small brown men wearing only loin coverings made of leaves. With sharp sticks they were digging up a large root. Startled, they fled. But the hunter gave chase, calling out: “I am good! I am good.” Finally, the men stopped in a stream bed, trembling.
Although the tongue spoken by the hunter was related to that of the Tasaday, he resorted to sign language because of difficulty in communicating. The hunter’s tribe practically lives back to back with the Tasaday, but the difference in their languages can be compared to that between early German and today’s English. Scientists have deduced that this suggests an isolation of about a thousand years. Why, the very name Tasaday (pronounced Taw-sawdai), combines the Malay word sadai (“abandoned”) and the Malayo-Polynesian word tawo (“man”)! Tasaday is also the name of the forested peak rising above their hidden valley. So complete has been their isolation that, when first contacted, they knew nothing about a nation called the Philippines.
The existence of this tribe became known to outsiders through the efforts of Panamin, a government agency working for the interests of cultural minorities in the Philippines. During early meetings between the hunter and the tribesmen at the forest’s edge, it was not known that they lived in caves, and there were no immediate attempts to go deep into the rain forest. The latter decision to visit the caves was made to protect the Tasaday from loggers, farmers, ranchers and miners who were nibbling away at their shrinking realm. Not long thereafter, the president of the Philippines signed a proclamation reserving some 200,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of land for them.
Entering the World of the Tasaday
March 23, 1972, marked the intrusion of the first outsiders—and of the twentieth century—into the world of the Tasaday. The helicopter was the only means of transportation that could effectively bring the expedition to within walking distance of the caves. Since the thick jungle made a ground landing impossible, a wooden platform was lashed to a treetop. The members of the expedition had to jump from the hovering helicopter onto the rickety landing pad that was rocking like a canoe in choppy water due to airblasts from the rotor blades. Lindbergh said his jump was “like passing through the looking glass” from modern to ancient times.
From the treetop, the group descended seventy-five feet (23 meters) to the ground below. There they were met by a young Tasaday man wearing only his leaf G-string. An hour’s hike down a ridge and along a sparkling stream brought the party to the home of the Tasaday: three limestone caves located 15 feet (5 meters) from the ground at an altitude of 4,500 feet (1,370 meters). Here they were, deep inside a tropical rain forest—damp and teeming with plant life. All around were giant ferns and orchids, rattan, climbing bamboo, wild banana and palm, as well as huge, towering dipterocarp trees shooting skyward to spread their canopies a hundred feet (30 meters) or more above the sides of the sloping valley.
Heads poked curiously from the ledges of the caves, as eyes scrutinized the first strangers ever to set foot in this hidden valley. A boy stepped from one of the caves, wrapped his arms and legs around a slender, white-barked tree and slid fifteen feet (5 meters) to the ground. He joined others who were shouting and bounding down a dusty path to cluster around the visitors. The outsiders were speechless as the scene unfolded! Here were men, women and children wearing only earrings and orchid-leaf G-strings and skirts, a handsome people with tanned skin and soft dark hair. They were a far cry from the hairy, lumbering apelike creatures depicted by evolutionary artists. No, the men do not hit their women with clubs or drag them by the hair. These are probably the gentlest people on the face of the earth.
The Tasaday Way of Life
When discovered, the tribe was composed of five families with thirteen children. The Tasaday practice monogamy, with no expectation of divorce and no provision for it. Couples mate for life—“until all our hair turns white,” said Kulataw and Sikal, one of the Tasaday couples. Marriages are solemnized mainly by a meeting of the tribe at the mouth of their main cave, where a group forms around the new couple and simply says, “Mafeon, mafeon” (“Good, good”). Brides also have been taken from Tasafang and Sanduka mountain groups, with whom the Tasaday have dealt on a limited basis.
A close look at the caves, the biggest of which was thirty feet deep and thirty-five feet wide (9 x 11 meters), was revealing. The walls have no drawings or markings, and the floor is swept clean by branches, leaving no debris. There is no furniture, except for a few bark mats. Also on hand are pieces of dried firewood and some bamboo, wooden and stone tools. The cave walls gleam like varnished coal due to years of exposure to soot from the fires used for cooking and heating the caves during the chilly evenings.
The gathering of food constitutes the day’s major activity, and it requires team effort. Normally three hours are spent in foraging, and the menu depends upon what they can gather: crabs, fish and tadpoles, which the Tasaday catch simply by feeling under and around stream rocks with their bare hands. The people have no knowledge of agriculture, gathering only what they need when it is available. Their diet indudes fruits, berries, flowers, bamboo shoots, yams and the pith of the wild palm prepared into a starch cake called natak. Food is cooked inside bamboo tubes or in leaf packets placed right on top of the glowing coals. Incidentally, fire is made by rotating a wooden drill between the palms until friction causes its base to smolder. Then tinder of dry moss is applied, and when this ignites, it is blown into a flame. The whole process takes about five minutes.
Because of the abundance of food, the Tasaday do not stray from their habitat like nomadic tribes who ‘pull up stakes’ when food runs out. The whole forest is a Tasaday “supermarket.” It is said that they have not ventured more than five miles (8 kilometers) from their home. “Our fathers and grandfathers told us we could go out into the forest at daytime, but must always return to the caves at night,” said one of them. It is thought that perhaps misunderstanding, war or fear of the smallpox plague (fugu) caused the Tasaday to cut off contact with the other Manobo tribes from which they originated.
With the midday meal over, the afternoon is spent resting, sleeping or ridding one another’s hair of dry leaves, twigs or lice. At play, one boy was seen flying a pet butterfly on a string, much as one would fly a kite. Their needs are simple, and they have no words for rice, salt, sugar, needle or tobacco. Although the Tasaday diet is low in calories (1,000 to 1,500 a day), among them there is no malnutrition, no tooth decay, no malaria and no tuberculosis. When the visitors asked them what they wanted, they answered, “What do you mean ‘want’?”
The Message of the Tasaday
The Tasaday also do not have any word in their language for fighting. They have no concept of war and do not have any idea of violence. Manuel Elizalde, Panamin head and the cabinet minister who led the expedition, stated: “They don’t know all the problems that send people into insane asylums and start wars and feuds and everything. All these things are foreign to them.”
Evolutionists thought that the discovery of the Tasaday would be “a shot in the arm” for their crumbling theory. But, despite being virtually cut off from civilization for centuries, the discipline and uprightness of the Tasaday combine to prove that man is not simply a higher form of animal. Unlike animals, he possesses the faculty of conscience, and also has the urge to worship. Interestingly, this need to worship became evident in the way the Tasaday regarded cabinet minister Elizalde. They believed that he was the “white god” who was to descend on their homesite one day and pay them a visit.
It is noteworthy that a people cut off from modern technology and all its conveniences could still emerge from their isolation in good mental and physical health, and with fine moral values, whereas “civilized” man today is beset with problems of mental and physical illness, earth-wide pollution, a moral breakdown and a constant fear of war.
Some pity the Tasaday because they lack worldly comforts and sophistication. Yet, thinking people may envy them for their uncomplicated way of life, being reminded of what God’s Word, the Bible, says: “We have brought nothing into the world, and neither can we carry anything out. So, having sustenance and covering, we shall be content with these things.”—1 Tim. 6:7, 8.