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The First ‘Confidence Man’ And Other Historic Cheats

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2019 28 min

Orson Welles - H. G. Wells — Orson Welles defending himself to journalists after the War of the Worlds panic. Corbis

4. The Fake Stone Age Tribe

Cover of a book about the Tasaday. Live Science

Throughout history, many have pictured and yearned for a more innocent age, when mankind was still pure and un-corrupted by civilization. That explains in large part why a perfect storm of international public interest erupted on July 16^th, 1971, when NBC Nightly News announced 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.“

The discovery of the Tasaday tribe, as the stone age group was known, was attributed to Manuel Elizalde, head of the Philippine government agency in charge of protecting cultural minorities, and a crony of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. According to Elizalde, he had discovered the Tasaday after receiving a tip from a local hunter about encounters with primitive tribesmen deep in the jungles of Mindanao. Tracking 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.

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.