A tall tale?

Nearly 40 years later, visitors find it difficult to believe that the tiny band had avoided contact with the outside world.

Towns and paved roads remain at least two days' hike away, but the caves are within two hours' walk of the communities of Manobo, Ubo and other cultural minorities who traded farm and forest produce for blades, radios, flashlights and guns with which to hunt game.

Around the time of Elizalde's find, older locals say, large groups of armed Muslim gunmen known as "Blackshirts" and Christian settler vigilantes called "Ilagas" regularly cut through the Tasaday area to pillage the homes of their sectarian rivals.

Four months later a bloody Muslim separatist rebellion erupted that has since consumed much of Mindanao. Marcos declared martial law and scientists lost access to the Tasaday forest.

Now the tree cover around Blit is mostly gone, replaced by corn rows that carpet entire mountainsides. Pack horses traverse the muddy trails delivering sackloads of grain to the towns.

Smoke drifts above the edge of the receding forest as more land is cleared for planting by new waves of migrants.

Tension over land is palpable as the powerless, poorly educated cultural minorities are pushed further to the fringes.

"We're still waiting for the government to give us titles to our land," said Manobo farmer Klil Dudim, Mafalo's younger half-brother who was not born when the Tasaday story broke.

Mafalo is sticking to the Stone Age story.

The government had ordered the Tasaday to move to wood and grass huts, he said, but could not say when. "Here we do not give names to years, months or days," he said.