Supposedly [Updated]

the "lost Amazon tribe" isn't entirely a hoax:




The tribe has been known since 1910.

In other words, they aren't quite on the level of the infamous Tasaday, who were revealed to be an elaborate hoax:

In 1986, nearly 15 years after the Tasaday were first discovered, everything changed. General Marcos's tyrannous regime was ousted and a new, freer, democratic government took its place.

A Swiss writer and Anthropologist named Oswald Iten took advantange of the opportunity to study the Tasaday without the former government's restrictions. He brought Joey Lozano, a journalist from South Cotabato, with him on his expedition. Strangely, when they reached the caves, they found them deserted. A search of the surrounding area led to the discovery of the same "Stone Age" people a short distance away living in modest huts, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans.

Iten and Lozano realized that the whole thing was a glorious hoax. Further research showed that the Tasaday actually came from two other tribes, tribes that had been part of the modern world for years. They publicized their findings through an ABC television documentary entitled The Tribe that Never Was. Millions of viewers were confronted with the images of Filipinos in T-shirts and Levi's laughing at the pictures of themselves from National Geographic. One anthropologist called the Tasaday, "rain forest clock punchers" who were "cave people" by day and went home to their families at night.

I love to read about hoaxes, and this one was one of the most celebrated of all time.

Manuel Elizalde, Jr. was the one responsible for the biggest anthropological hoax since the Piltdown Man. According to the article, he ended up leaving the Philippines with some $35 million from the so-called non-profit he set up on behalf of the Tasaday.

Unfortunately, those riches didn't last. Manuel died in 1997, a penniless drug addict who is remembered as one of the great hoaxers of all time.

A faithful YouTube person (apparently the filmmaker) has uploaded a documentary made just a couple of years before the Tasaday hoax was known to the world.

Part 1:



Part 2 (link):



Thank God for YouTube!

Museum of Hoaxes takes a more middle-of-the-road approach and claims the Tasaday weren't completely fraudulent; they weren't stone-age innocents, but they were very poor people exploited:

To sum up: The Tasaday weren’t a true stone-age tribe. But nor were they farmers coerced into playing a stone-age tribe. Instead, they were very poor people living close to Nature in the Philippine jungle who became swept up in and manipulated by global events beyond their control. This version of events isn’t as compelling as the versions that made headlines in 1971 and 1986, but it is a good illustration of how the truth is often far messier and more complicated than it appears at first glance.

If they weren't totally a hoax, they were damned close to it.