They reportedly lived in a cave, used stone tools, subsisted solely by foraging on wild foods, and had no knowledge of agriculture or contact with farmers. After 1974, the Philippine government strictly prohibited all contact between outsiders and the Tasaday. With the upheaval surrounding the fall of the Marcos in 1986, Western reporters returned to Cotabato and found the Tasaday living in houses in a farming village and wearing Western clothing.
Specialists disagree on the matter.
In 1991 an independent anthropologist issued a report concluding that the Tasaday were probably a band of foragers who did in fact live in the Cotabato rain forest but who were not nearly as isolated as the initial reports by the government agency entrusted with their protection made them out to be. These facts suggest that the Tasaday represent the descendants of a group of Cotabato Manobo farmers who moved into the rain forest and adopted a mobile economy based on foraging, small-scale horticulture, and trade with surrounding farmers. It is unlikely that they ever lived permanently in caves. The precise nature of the Tasaday band prior to 1971, however, is difficult to assess and remains controversial. Listing from Electric Library , a pay service.