In 1971 a small group of extremely primitive, leaf-wearing, "Stone-Age" people was discovered living in a remote region of the Philippine rain forest. Called the Tasaday, after a nearby mountain, these people had apparently never had contact with the outside world.

The Tasaday immediately attracted a flurry of interest. Politicians, reporters, anthropologists, and celebrities all made the trip out into the rainforest to visit them. But in 1974 the Marcos government declared martial law, restricting access to the rainforest, and all contact with the Tasaday was temporarily lost.

In 1986, after the overthrow of Marcos, a Swiss journalist named Oswald Iten trekked out into the jungle to see them. To his surprise, he found the Tasaday dressed in western clothes living a simple, but definitely not Stone-Age, life. Some of the members of the tribe told him they weren't really a Stone-Age tribe, that the Marcos government had pressured them into posing as such. This revelation caused an international uproar, and the Tasaday were branded a hoax.

Today it is no longer clear to what extent the Tasaday actually were a hoax. Academics who have studied the tribe note that, while they may not have been as isolated as initially thought, they certainly were living a very primitive lifestyle, and linguistic evidence suggests they really were a distinct tribal group. The Tasaday who confessed later claimed they were bribed to do so by anti-Marcos factions hoping to discredit the former regime.