In the Economist:
MADAGASCAR is renowned for its unusual animals, particularly its lemurs, a group of primates extinct elsewhere on the planet. Its human population, though, is equally unusual. The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliest migrants in the middle of the first millennium AD. Moreover, despite Madagascar’s proximity to Africa (400km, or 250 miles, at the closest point) those settlers have long been suspected of having arrived from the Malay Archipelago—modern Indonesia—more than 6,000km away.There are three reasons for this suspicion. First, it has been recognised for centuries that the Malagasy language, though distinct, borrows a lot of words from Javanese, Malay and the tongues of Borneo and Sulawesi. Second, the islanders’ culture includes artefacts ranging from boats with outriggers to xylophones, and crops such as bananas and rice, that are (or, rather, were then) characteristically Asian, not African. And third, genetic evidence has linked the modern Malagasy with people living in eastern Indonesia as well as farther off in Melanesia and Oceania...[continue reading]
Image courtesy of Lonely Planet
