Though Madagascar lies only 250 miles off the African coast, linguistic and archeological evidence suggest that its first settlers--who arrived in about 400 A.D.--hailed not from Africa but from Indonesia, more than 3,000 miles to the east. All 13 million of Madagascar’s present-day people speak Malagasy, which, though it contains some African Bantu words, is most closely related to the Maanyan language of the Barito River region of Borneo. Africans are not thought to have arrived in Madagascar until much later; exactly when is unknown.
To check the accuracy of this long-established linguistic evidence, Himla Soodyall, a molecular evolutionary biologist at Penn State, turned to the techniques of modern genetic analysis. She has found that some Malagasy have a genetic kinship with Polynesians, of all people-- indicating that Polynesia and Madagascar may have been settled by the same population of seafaring Indonesians.
Soodyall compared the incidence of a genetic marker ...
