From The Guardian: the top 10 scientific hoaxes of all time. A very interesting list, some of which I’d heard of, some of which I hadn’t, and one that I’d never heard was a hoax.
2. The amazing Tasaday tribe
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In 1971 Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister, discovered a small stone age tribe living in utter isolation on the island of Mindanao. These people, the Tasaday, spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. They made love, not war, and became icons of innocence; reminders of a vanished Eden.
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They also made the television news headlines, the cover of National Geographic, were the subject of a bestselling book, and were visited by Charles A Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Anthropologists tried to get a more sustained look, but President Marcos declared a 45,000-acre Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.
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After Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists got in and found that the Tasaday lived in houses, traded smoked meat with local farmers, wore Levi’s T-shirts and spoke a recognisable local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had only moved into caves, donned leaves and performed for cameras under pressure from Elizalde – who had fled the country in 1983 along with millions from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde died in 1997.
I remember reading about the Tasaday tribe in National Geographic (though as the issue was printed in 1972, the year before my birth, it must have been much later when I found it) and being absolutely fascinated that they’d been able to survive unchanged for so long. A bit of a bummer that it was a hoax, but not terribly surprising.
(via MeFi)
Reminds me of a tangent placed in one of those fairly old Mac Archive books which included all the code names of prereleased Macs. As Apple was working on a new piece of hardware (maybe the G3, I’m not sure) they code named their three new machines after hoaxes. One was Cold Fusion, another Piltdown and the last… Carl Sagan.
I think he sued for that.
From what I know, he only complained about their use of the word “Sagan” as a code name. He didn’t sue until he found out that after his lawyers told Apple to cease using Sagan, they changed their code name for the computer to BHA — Butt Head Astronomer.