The Discovery--Part 2

    In March of 1972, at the invitation of the Tasaday, Elizalde led an expedition into the interior of the forest to visit the people and pinpoint the location of their caves and homeland so an area could be established for a protected reservation.  The visitors entered by jumping from a hovering helicopter onto a platform built into a treetop so as to not make a trail or clear a landing place that others could use to find the Tasaday’s place. Subsequent expeditions--always with armed security guards--also entered by helicopter to avoid the gangs of rebels and bandits that frequented the region.

The first expedition included a team for National Geographic Magazine (writer Kenneth MacLeish and photographer John Launois), free-lance photojournalist John Nance, and American anthropologist Frank Lynch of Ateneo de Manila, a leading Philippine university, who took over leadership of scientific studies from Robert Fox, who had a falling out with Elizalde. Lynch would use the basic program and scientists scheduled by Fox. Both anthropologists had PhD’s from University of Chicago and had spent more than two decades in the Philippines. With Lynch was Carlos Fernandez, a Filipino anthropologist studying for his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Although Elizalde invited the social scientists, he insisted the first priority was not scientific research but protection of the Tasaday and their close-to-nature way of life.    

    The visitors included 70-year-old Charles Lindbergh, the well- known aviator who’d become a dedicated conservationist and believed the Tasaday could teach modern people valuable lessons about life and survival. Lindbergh would later describe his visit as “one of the great experiences of life.”

    The expedition stayed ten days and gathered basic information about the Tasaday, their culture, social structure, subsistence patterns, and environment--notably the three caves in a mountainside above a swift-flowing stream that they said was their home base. The twenty-six Tasaday were  in seven nuclear families, and related through the males. Married couples were monogamous and said they stayed together until their “hair turned white.” The women had married in from the Tasafeng and Sanduka--groups that the Tasaday had not seen since Dula married Mahayag, apparently more than five years ago judging from the ages of their two children. The Tasaday couldn’t explain what had happened to the other groups and said they had looked and looked, but they were not to be found. The young men, especially Belayem, a bachelor in his early 20s and next in the pecking order to marry, were deeply concerned over the lack of women as brides.

On a later expedition in 1972, Sindi, a childless widow from the Blit tribe, visited the Tasaday as a friend of Igna, the lead translator. Sindi met Belayem, who courted her, and eventually she moved into the forest as his wife. Elizalde encouraged the other Tasaday to find spouses in their traditional way.

    Throughout the year, six more expeditions visited the Tasaday and brought three anthropologists, two linguists, and two ethnobotanists and their assistants to study the Tasaday in teams for periods ranging from a few days to six weeks. One pair of scholars who planned an extended period of field work were interrupted when gunmen approached their camp below the caves and exchanged shots with tribal camp guards. The field study was halted and the gunmen chased away.

    Meanwhile, the Tasaday developed a taste for rice, which was provided to them when visitors came so they would not have to make forays into the forest to gather food.                        

    Ethnobotanist D.E, Yen, of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, together with botanist Hermes Gutierrez of the Phiipppine National Museum conducted a six-week study of the Tasaday’s use of plants. Yen said it appeared the group had lived before Dafal “as close to nature as any people known in modern times--in a symbiotic state between the people, plants, and terrestrial animals.”

    Linguists Teodoro Llamzon, Richard Elkins, and  Carol Molony made independent studies of Tasaday speech and agreed they spoke a unique dialect of Manobo in the Malayo-Polynesian or Austronesian familiy of languages found throughout this part of the Pacific region.

Anthropologists Fox, Lynch and Fernandez concluded the Tasaday were true gatherers who had only recently learned from Dafal how to trap animals and to extract the pith of palms to make a starchy food called natek. They noted also that the Tasaday put a high value on sharing and cooperation;  were extremely fond of their children, held and carried the young ones everywhere--with men as well as women caring for the children. 

    From 1971 through 1974 eleven social scientists--those already mentioned plus ethologist Ireneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and David Baradas. an anthropologist from the Philippines-- and a similar number of journalists visited the Tasaday for varying periods of time, with space between visits in which the Tasaday were left alone. The journalists included documentary film teams from The National Geographic Society and NBC-TV from the US and NDR-TV from West Germany.  Some scientific researchers were upset that journalists had been allowed nearly as much time as social scientists, but Elizalde maintained that the goal was protection and preservation of the Tasaday, not necessarily scientific study. Some scholars agreed with his handling of the project, but others did not. One of Elizalde’s concerns was that through contact the Tasaday were changing too rapidly.

In the Heart of the Forest