The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest

Millions of us glimpsed the Tasaday on television or read tantalizing but incomplete accounts of them in the press, causing people the world over to ask after their safety. Here is the first book that tells the full story of these gentle, loving, and beautiful people. After three years spent documenting the Tasaday and working on their behalf, John Nance has revealed them as even more exciting—and deeply touching—than the first reports had indicated. He details the Tasaday's discovery by the outside world in 1971 and their first years of contact with modern society—from their terrified first encounter with a helicopter, which they thought was a giant insect, to their itch to venture outside their mountain sanctuary to the "flat world" beyond. He tells of efforts to protect them from twentieth-century dangers, including the threatening presence of outlaw gunmen who sneaked to their caves to "get a taste of the Tasaday"—a people with no weapons and no known words for enemy or war.

Mr. Nance explores their tender love for one another and for some of their visitors, and recounts their struggles with new technology (simple knives, for example, have swept them thousands of years ahead of their Stone Age time). He treats the Tasaday as a living, laughing, weeping people- not as mere creatures of anthropological curiosity (though the impressions of several social scientists are included).

This same depth of portrayal is given to the late Charles A. Lindbergh's part in expeditions to the Tasaday, and to Manuel Elizalde, Jr. (Manda), the extraordinary Harvard-educated Filipino ex-playboy. Lindbergh says in his Foreword: "I felt like I had been on a visit to my ancestors a hundred thousand years ago." So will the reader, who will end up, as Lindbergh did, "pondering the future for both cave and twentieth-century man."

Published in 1975 by John Nance

463 pages / Hardcover