BLIT, Philippines (AFP) – – When he was young Lobo swung on vines and hung around a cave, the long-haired, loinclothed 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 — just one among 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 sows 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.

Then-president Ferdinand Marcos declared a 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) 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 named as head of a government agency that protected the interests of cultural minorities, had bribed some locals to pose as Stone Age men.

Full Story: AFP/Yahoo PH