Great post, Ian.
Unless or until someone finds a good reference to the tribes of the Philippines, we're left guessing.
However, I'd be willing to bet money that, when we finally do figure out where these blades come from, it'll be a Philippine tribe, probably in the north, and that Therion's blade was brought home from a WWII soldier.
As an (apparent) aside, remember when the space shuttle Challenger blew up? The New York stock Exchange correctly figured out that components from Morton Thiokol had caused the explosion (Thiokol stock dropped far more steeply than did the stock of all other shuttle contractors). It took an expert commission months to figure out that it was the O-rings on the booster rockets built by Morton Thiokol.
Now, the stock market didn't have any inside information, but it did serve as a great way for agglomerating a bunch of disparate information into an accurate result. It was accurate, in part, because people had money riding on the outcome.
This is the whole basis for the Iowa Elections Market and other such predictive markets.
Getting back to this blade, I think we're seeing the same "market of ideas" here. None of us knows what it is, but (combined with the picture) a bunch of us are independently coming up with the same kinds of answers. My guess is that, as a forum, we're probably right, although I'm not sure each of us is individually. In
Going back to what Ian said, I'd like to see definitive evidence. However, I wouldn't discount the meanderings we've done so far.
Fun case!
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