Archeology: Madagascar folks came from Asia (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 02, 2016, 00:36 (3095 days ago) @ David Turell

The language suggests Asian origin and now Asian plants have been uncovered:-https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/01/signs-of-madagascars-first-settlers-discovered-and-they-came-from-3000-miles-away/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_science-"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."-***-"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," -***-"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 -***-"Whatever their motivation for crossing the Indian Ocean, Crowther's study helps parse out what happened when they arrived at the other side. Analysis of charred, microscopic remnants of seeds and other plant parts showed that they arrived first in the Comoros, and then in Madagascar, carrying with them the crops of their homelands.-"This is something of a surprise, because the people of the Comoros islands today have no obvious linguistic, ethnic or genetic connection to southeast Asia. But the archipelago has had a tumultuous history, marked by centuries of trading and slave raiding, which could have diluted the initial Austronesian influence.-***
"'This makes sense in many respects," Crowther said, "as it has long been suggested that the Comoros were stepping-stone islands between the African mainland and Madagascar."-"She and her colleagues hope to conduct more genetic analyses to clear up this mystery. They also plan to continue their excavation of the islands in search of more botanical data, especially from Asian plants such as banana and taro that don't produce seeds, and are harder to find records of. That involves scraping microscopic remains from shards of pottery and the tarter on ancient teeth. (Yum.)-"'This would show us that people were actually processing and eating these foods as well," Crowther wrote."-Comment: If they canoed across the Indian Ocean it is like the Pacific Islanders navigating about. Humans are intrepid wanderers. These folks are so close to Africa, but not from there.