Philippines 'Stone-Age' men stick to the story

When he was young Lobo swung on vines and hung around a cave, the long-haired, loin-clothed poster child of a sensational Stone Age tribe supposedly lost in the time warp of a remote Philippines rainforest.

Now with the western scholars, journalists and celebrities a distant memory, Lobo Bilangan wears faded tracksuits, chainsmokes, and eats canned sardines - one of hundreds of poor farmers slashing and burning their way through the forest.

"We were denounced as a hoax," said Lobo, a thin man with a receding hairline who grows maize on the cleared land to feed his three wives and 10 children.

"But as far as I am concerned, I am a real Tasaday," said the one-time National Geographic Magazine cover boy, speaking through an interpreter.

Gone was the strange tongue of the band of 26 people who, it was said, lived in caves and used bamboo and stone tools.

Instead he is fluent in Manobo, spoken by one of several highland minorities of Mindanao island.

President Ferdinand Marcos declared a 19,000-hectare reservation around the caves soon after his friend Manuel Elizalde told the world in June 1971 about a gentle tribe that spoke a dialect lacking the words "war", "weapon" or "enemy".

Critics say Mr Marcos and Mr Elizalde, later made head of a government agency that protected the interests of cultural minorities, had bribed some locals to pose as Stone Age men.

"The so-called Tasaday were in fact Ubo," said Salvador Ramos, a politician and journalist in the nearby town of T'boli who had had extensive contact with the group.

Foreign and Filipino experts visiting the caves after Mr Marcos and Mr Elizalde fled the country in the 1980s found them abandoned, the people having moved to nearby villages and conventional homes.

Anthropologists came away convinced that the Tasaday were made up by Mr Elizalde, who died shortly after his return to the Philippines in the late 1990s.

There were allegations that Mr Elizalde had created the story to support his political ambitions and raise money using the cultural minorities as a front.

But Maman Udelan, whose mother Dul was portrayed as a near-naked cavewoman, still insists his parents did not farm and ate only what they could forage in wild fruits, yams and palm pith.

"They did not know there were other people in Blit," said Maman, now dressed in a polyester shirt and basketball shorts and equipped with a machete, referring to the settled communities on the other side of the mountain.

Mafalo Dudim, hired by Mr Elizalde as a translator at the time, said that though he did not speak the Tasaday tongue, "there are slight similarities with the Manobo dialect."

Mafalo said he helped build a helicopter pad near the caves, using wooden planks lashed across the cropped crown of a large tree.

Mr Elizalde carefully screened visitors descended into the forest floor on ladders.

Nearly 40 years later, visitors find it difficult to believe that the tiny band had avoided contact with the outside world.

Towns and paved roads remain at least two days' hike away, but the caves are within two hours' walk of the communities of Manobo, Ubo and other cultural minorities who traded farm and forest produce for blades, radios, flashlights and guns with which to hunt game.

Around the time of Mr Elizalde's find, older locals say, large groups of armed Muslim gunmen known as Blackshirts and Christian settler vigilantes called Ilagas regularly cut through the Tasaday area to pillage the homes of their sectarian rivals.

Four months later a bloody Muslim separatist rebellion erupted that has since consumed much of Mindanao. Marcos declared martial law and scientists lost access to the Tasaday forest.

Now the tree cover around Blit is mostly gone, replaced by corn rows that carpet entire mountainsides. Pack horses traverse the muddy trails delivering sack loads of grain to the towns.

Smoke drifts above the edge of the receding forest as more land is cleared for planting by new waves of migrants.

Tension over land is palpable as the powerless, poorly educated cultural minorities are pushed further to the fringes.

"We're still waiting for the government to give us titles to our land," said Manobo farmer Klil Dudim, Mafalo's younger half-brother who was not born when the Tasaday story broke.

Mafalo is sticking to the Stone Age story.

The government had ordered the Tasaday to move to wood and grass huts, he said, but could not say when. "Here we do not give names to years, months or days," he said.