Word: dafal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dafal found them. Stick-thin and lemur-eyed, he was the Daniel Boone of southern Mindanao, a solitary Filipino who wandered an unexplored 600-sq. mi. tract of rugged mountain jungle. One day in the early '60s, he followed a trail of strange footprints. Three small brown men, naked except for loin pouches made of leaves, were digging up a large root with a sharp stick. When they saw him, they fled like monkeys. Shouting reassurance, Dafal gave chase until the men stopped in a stream bed, trembling...
...took ten years for Dafal's stories about the forest people to reach the Filipino commissioner for minorities, a hard-working young millionaire named Manuel Elizalde Jr. Alarmed because logging companies were cutting roads through the Tasaday retreat, the official ordered Dafal to bring the tribe out for a meeting. Stone axes in hand, they stood like figures in an Erich von Däniken fantasy as Elizalde descended from the heavens in his helicopter. They immediately dubbed him Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday (Big Sacred Bird of the Tasaday...
...existence of the Tasaday, as the tribesmen call themselves, came to light after a trapper named Dafal reported that he had encountered a mysterious people on his hunting trips into the hinterland. Philippine officials checked out the rumor via helicopter and found a group of short, brown-skinned tribesmen wearing only loincloths...
...scrapers, choppers and pounders, and by fashioning containers, knives and other implements out of bamboo. Their chief food is natak, the pith of wild palms. They also eat wild yams, rattan and bamboo shoots, small fish, crabs and tadpoles that they catch with their hands. Through contact with Dafal, the Tasaday have learned to trap birds in a sticky substance; civet cats, rats, monkeys and pigs are taken in primitive traps. Fires are still set by rubbing pieces of wood together, and meat either roasted over an open flame or boiled in bamboo cooking tubes...
...twelve square miles-as a preserve that will be off limits to loggers, ranchers, miners and other invaders. But even well-intentioned visitors from the 20th century may undermine any future anthropological studies of the tribe; gifts of a bow and arrow, a metal bolo knife and sugar from Dafal and the investigating scientists are already moving the Tasaday out of the Stone...
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