Can You Describe The Discovery Of The Tasaday People Of The Philippines?
Sometime in 1966, a hunter from a town at the forest’s edge stumbled upon them while laying his wild-pig traps deep in the mountains of South Cotabato. Following a trail of strange footprints, he came upon three small brown men wearing only loin coverings made of leaves. With sharp sticks they were digging up a large root. Startled, they fled. But the hunter gave chase, calling out: “I am good! I am good.” Finally, the men stopped in a stream bed, trembling. Although the tongue spoken by the hunter was related to that of the Tasaday, he resorted to sign language because of difficulty in communicating. The hunter’s tribe practically lives back to back with the Tasaday, but the difference in their languages can be compared to that between early German and today’s English. Scientists have deduced that this suggests an isolation of about a thousand years. Why, the very name Tasaday (pronounced Taw-sawdai), combines the Malay word sadai (“abandoned”) and the Malayo-Polynesian word tawo (“ma
