Lost Tribe of the Tasaday

In most areas of the earth, the Stone Age came to an end thousands of years ago, but not in the remote mountain forests of the Philippine island of Mindanao, 650 miles south of Manila. There, scientists recently discovered a lost tribe of Stone Age human beings whose way of life has remained unchanged for aeons. Excited by their unique opportunity, Philippine anthropologists last week prepared for an expedition into the jungle to live with the tribesmen and investigate their customs before the primitive culture is contaminated or obliterated by encroaching civilization.

The existence of the Tasaday, as the tribesmen call themselves, came to light after a trapper named Dafal reported that he had encountered a mysterious people on his hunting trips into the hinterland. Philippine officials checked out the rumor via helicopter and found a group of short, brown-skinned tribesmen wearing only loincloths.

Jungle Habitat. Making contact with the Tasaday, the government agents soon determined that the tribe had been isolated for at least 700 years and perhaps for 2,000, and had no knowledge of agriculture. The Tasaday are unfamiliar with rice, taro, salt and sugar, have never eaten corn and, according to authorities, may be "the only people in the world today who do not know or use tobacco."

The tribesmen also have no metal technology, no domestic animals and no permanent dwellings. Though situated on an island, they live in a mountainous, thickly wooded area of rain forest, have never seen the sea and have no word for it in their strange Malayo-Polynesian language.

The Tasaday have survived in their primitive state chiefly by gathering rather than growing food, by utilizing stones as scrapers, choppers and pounders, and by fashioning containers, knives and other implements out of bamboo. Their chief food is natak, the pith of wild palms. They also eat wild yams, rattan and bamboo shoots, small fish, crabs and tadpoles that they catch with their hands. Through contact with Dafal, the Tasaday have learned to trap birds in a sticky substance; civet cats, rats, monkeys and pigs are taken in primitive traps. Fires are still set by rubbing pieces of wood together, and meat either roasted over an open flame or boiled in bamboo cooking tubes.

Numbering only about a hundred, the Tasaday live in families, consisting of mother, father, unmarried children and sometimes an orphan or childless widow. Though polygamy and polyandry are customary among other food-gathering peoples with small populations, the Tasaday shun both. Their marriages are arranged by parents, but in at least one case, when women were scarce a father captured a bride for his son from a neighboring Tasaday group. The Tasaday mother delivers her own child, and the father buries the umbilical cord. Outside the family, there is no formal community organization and no single leader, but several families cooperate in food-foraging, making decisions together and depending for advice on the most experienced among them.

Epidemic Smallpox. That advice, the Tasaday believe, is based on knowledge that is transmitted by their ancestors. In their dreams, the tribesmen may see the sugoy, their deceased "soul relatives," who live in fine dwellings among the treetops, as well as Salungal, "the owner of the mountains," who tells them where to search for palm pith and game animals.

The Tasaday are a timid people, wary of strangers and so afraid of the fugu, or epidemics like smallpox, that have ravaged the area in the past that they are reported to abandon sick people to die alone and unaided. Their precarious existence permits few to reach old age, and they seem to find little joy in life. Yet the Tasaday like to stand in the rain and let the water course down their bodies. And they enjoy the music of the kubing, a kind of jew's-harp made from bamboo and carried from place to place in a bamboo box.

To retain the "lost" tribe as a link with man's distant past, the Philippine government may designate the Tasaday forest home--estimated to be twelve square miles--as a preserve that will be off limits to loggers, ranchers, miners and other invaders. But even well-intentioned visitors from the 20th century may undermine any future anthropological studies of the tribe; gifts of a bow and arrow, a metal bolo knife and sugar from Dafal and the investigating scientists are already moving the Tasaday out of the Stone Age.

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