The Gentle Tasaday:

If the Yanomamö are “the fiercest people on earth,” does cultural determinism require that there necessarily be “the gentlest people on earth”?

In 1968, the pioneer biosocial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published the first edition of the anthropology classic Yanomamö: The Fierce People. In the book, Chagnon describes the life of a tribe of South American Indians called the Yanomamö, living in the jungles of Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomamö are so fierce and warlike that a third of adult males (and 7% of adult females) die in their constant battle. They are thought to be the fiercest people on earth.

Now that the Yanomamö were known to the world through Chagnon’s work, the cultural determinists -- the intellectual descendants of Franz Boas -- had a task at hand. If human culture and behavior were infinitely variable, as the cultural determinists believed, then there must exist the opposite of the Yanomamö somewhere on earth. If there were “the fiercest people on earth,” then there must also be “the gentlest people on earth.” Merely three years later, the cultural determinists got their wish.

In 1971, Manuel Elizalde, an official of the Marcos government in the Philippines, discovered an isolated tribe of 26 men, women, and children on the island of Mindanao. Called the Tasaday, they were said to lead a Stone Age life, without any knowledge of agriculture or even the existence of any other humans besides themselves. They had been completely cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. They were wearing leaves and living in a cave. Among other things, they were so peaceful (so opposite of the Yanomamö) that their language did not even contain any word for violence, conflict, or aggression. Two years later, a book describing their peaceful life was published with the predictable title The Gentle Tasaday.

With the help of the Marcos government, Elizalde tightly controlled media and scientific access to the Tasaday for 15 years. As a result, not much more was known about them, and what was known about them by the rest of the world was officially sanctioned by Elizalde. In 1986, the Marcos government collapsed and Elizalde fled the country to Costa Rica. When two journalists went to the site of the original discovery of the Tasaday, they found the cave empty. They found the Tasaday in a nearby village, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans. Upon further questioning, two of the original 26 Tasaday admitted to pretending to be Stone Age people upon Elizalde’s insistence. It turns out that Marcos had instructed Elizalde to manufacture this band of peaceful Stone Age people in order to attract the world’s attention to the Philippines but away from the brutal policies of his oppressive government. When a group of German journalists went to the cave a few days after the two original journalists uncovered the hoax, they discovered the Tasaday once again playing the parts of Stone Age people, pretending to live in a cave and wearing leaves on top of their T-shirts and blue jeans.

On a personal note, when I took my very first college sociology course in 1982, my instructor used the second edition, published in 1981, of the bestselling introductory sociology textbook Sociology by Ian Robertson. On page 57, there is a picture of the Tasaday, all peacefully and quietly sitting in their cave. The caption to the photograph reads:

The Tasaday, a recently discovered “stone age” tribe in the Philippines, apparently do not have words in their language to express enmity or hatred. Competition, acquisitiveness, aggression, and greed are all unknown among these gentle people. The existence of societies like the Tasaday challenges Western assumptions about “human nature.”

Five years later, I taught my own introductory sociology course at the University of Washington for the first time and used the third edition of Robertson’s still bestselling textbook, published in 1987, a year after the hoax had been uncovered. All references to the Tasaday had been deleted in the third edition.

Incredibly, anthropologists, a majority of whom are uninformed by modern evolutionary theory and are thus blinded by the Standard Social Science Model, still debate the authenticity of the Tasaday even today, but the majority opinion appears to be that they were not a genuine Stone Age people. One thing is certain: A small tribe of 26 people could not have been completely isolated from the outside world for centuries because that would lead to massive inbreeding. And they also could not possibly have been so peaceful that their language lacked any word for conflict and competition. For better or worse, aggression and violence are integral part of male human nature. It could be heightened, as among the Yanomamö, but it could not be completely erased from human nature.