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The Dumbest Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in History

Khalid Elhassan October 30, 2022 33 min

The Fascinating Discovery of a Stone Age Tribe in the Twentieth Century

Mindanao tribes men who participated in the Stone Age hoax of the 1970s in their own home, 1986.

NBC Nightly News viewers on July 16^th, 1971 were treated to an amazing discovery: “The outside world, after maybe a thousand years, has discovered a small tribe of people living in a remote jungle in the Philippines. Until now, the outside world didn’t know they existed… and they didn’t know the outside world existed. Their way of living is approximately that of the Stone Age“. Known as the Tasaday, the tribe’s discovery was announced by Manuel Elizalde, head of the Filipino government agency in charge of protecting cultural minorities, and a crony of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Per Elizalde, he discovered the Tasaday after he got a tip from a local hunter about encounters with primitive tribesmen deep in the jungles of Mindanao.

When he tracked down the tip, Elizalde was astonished to discover that the tribe had been isolated for over a thousand years, with no contact with the outside world. As Elizalde described the Tasaday: “They didn’t realize there was a country. They didn’t realize there was a sea beyond Mindanao. … they did not even know what rice was.” They were also complete pacifists: “They have no words for weapons, hostility, or war“. Overnight, the Tasaday went from unknown to globally famous. Unfortunately, as seen below, the Tasaday were simply a dumb get-rich-quick scheme concocted by Elizalde. Although perhaps not so dumb, since Elizalde did get rich from the scheme.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.