The great Malagasy leap into the unknown

Today there was a short article in Discover on a paper published last spring on the models for the settling of Madagascar. I didn't pay too much attention when the paper came out for two reasons. First, it focused on Y and mtDNA, and I've been playing with Malagasy autosomes. Second, it seemed a ridiculously brutal computational attack on a question which seems to have a straightforward intuitive explanation: yes, Madagascar was settled by a small founding group. With hindsight I may have spoken too soon, or passed judgement too hastily. Looking at the paper the explicit model building of demography does still seem like overkill, but they obtain some important precision here. The phylogenetics and the archaeology align nicely. Though the authors of the article talk about future directions, I think we will find that the Malagasy originate from a small group of Malayo-Polynesians who did find themselves stranded ...