When he was young Lobo swung on vines and hung around a cave, the long-haired, loin-clothed poster child of a sensational Stone Age tribe supposedly lost in the time warp of a remote Philippines rainforest.

Now with the western scholars, journalists and celebrities a distant memory, Lobo Bilangan wears faded tracksuits, chainsmokes, and eats canned sardines — one of hundreds of poor farmers slashing and burning their way through the forest.

"We were denounced as a hoax," said Lobo, a thin man with a receding hairline who grows maize on the cleared land to feed his three wives and 10 children.

"But as far as I am concerned, I am a real Tasaday," said the one-time National Geographic Magazine cover boy, speaking through an interpreter.

Gone was the strange tongue of the band of 26 people who, it was said, lived in caves and used bamboo and stone tools. Instead he is fluent in Manobo, spoken by one of several highland minorities of Mindanao Island.

President Ferdinand Marcos declared a 19 000-hectare reservation around the caves soon after his friend Manuel Elizalde told the world in June 1971 about a gentle tribe that spoke a dialect lacking the words "war", "weapon" or "enemy".

Critics say Marcos and Elizalde — later made head of a government agency that protected the interests of cultural minorities — had bribed some locals to pose as Stone Age men.

"The so-called Tasaday were in fact Ubo," said Salvador Ramos, a politician and journalist in the nearby town of T'boli who had had extensive contact with the group.

Foreign and Filipino experts visiting the caves after Marcos and Elizalde fled the country in the 1980s found them abandoned, the people having moved to nearby villages and conventional homes.

Anthropologists came away convinced that the Tasaday were made up by Elizalde, who died shortly after his return to the Philippines in the late 1990s.

There were allegations that Elizalde had created the story to support his political ambitions and raise money using the cultural minorities as a front.

But Maman Udelan, whose mother Dul was portrayed as a near-naked cavewoman, still insists his parents did not farm and ate only what they could forage in wild fruits, yams and palm pith.

"They did not know there were other people in Blit," said Maman, now dressed in a polyester shirt and basketball shorts and equipped with a machete, referring to the settled communities on the other side of the mountain.

Mafalo Dudim, hired by Elizalde as a "translator" at the time, said that though he did not speak the "Tasaday" tongue, "there are slight similarities with the Manobo dialect".

Mafalo said he helped build a helicopter pad near the caves, using wooden planks lashed across the cropped crown of a large tree. Elizalde carefully screened visitors who descended into the forest floor on ladders.

AFP

Web a teen at 40 40 years after Leonard Kleinrock and his team created the internet it has become an adolescent.

Can't touch this! Hadlee Simons thinks touch-screens are a bit silly. His first Dashboard Diatribe explains why.

Win a copy of Section 8! iafrica.com and Ster Kinekor are giving away four copies of Section 8 for Xbox 360 and PC!