Modern Madagascar History

Borneo and Madagascar are separated by thousands of miles of deep blue sea. But the languages spoken
on the two islands are eerily similar. So are the twists of DNA packed inside the cells of the people who
inhabit them. The Malagasy people who live in Madagascar farm the same crops as people in Southeast
Asia, and they tell stories of the ancestral "Vahoaka Ntaolo," or "ancient people of the canoe," who came
to their island long ago.
Despite the distance, all the living evidence suggests that sometime during the first millennium, a small
group of Austronesians crossed the Indian Ocean via canoe to become some of the first people to settle
one of the last uninhabited places on Earth. The author and environmental historian Jared Diamond calls
it "the single most astonishing fact of human geography for the entire world."
On the other hand, ancient evidence for this unlikely story of Madagascar's colonization has been almost
impossible to find. For years, archaeologists have sought to uncover remnants of the island's early
settlers that would connect them to ocean-faring Austronesians — but those efforts always came up empty
or inconclusive. Meanwhile, in the past decade, their colleagues have found signs that African hunter
gatherers were there more than 2,000 years ago.
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"Linguistic and genetic studies … only give us the modern picture," Alison Crowther, an archaeologist at
the University of Queensland, wrote in an email. "Archaeology is important for providing direct evidence
of how, when and why past people made this journey across the Indian Ocean, including where else in
eastern Africa they might have landed."
So Crowther and her colleagues decided to investigate a new line of evidence: ancient plants. Excavations
of thousands of gallons of sediments from 18 sites across Madagascar and other islands off the east
African coast revealed that Madagascar and the Comoros archipelago were dominated by ancient Asian
cultivars, especially mung beans and rice.
"These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the Southeast Asian
colonization of Madagascar," the authors reported Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
Alison Crowther processes archaeological sediment to recover plant remains in Pemba, eastern Africa.
(Mark Horton/University of Bristol)
Past genetic studies have suggested that settlers from the east arrived in Madagascar about 1,200 years
ago — perhaps against their will. In 2012, scientists reported that they'd traced the lineages of several
hundred Malagasy people back to a group of just 30 women of mostly Indonesian descent. This is
exceptionally small for a founding population (even though New Zealand probably was colonized by a
similarly tiny group), and there isn't much evidence that ancient Indonesians attempted to start other
trading colonies.