A.D. 830: A storm sends an Indonesian trading ship drastically off course. Months later, dozens of ragged survivors make landfall on an island off the southeast coast of Africa, more than 3,000 miles from home. Today, Murray Cox, a computational biologist at New Zealand’s Massey University, says a scenario like this may describe the murky origins of the first permanent settlements on Madagascar, home to about 22 million people today.
Genetic and linguistic studies suggest the island’s native Malagasy people are mainly of Indonesian descent. The idea of early Indonesians traveling 3,000 miles to the island intrigued Cox. “It’s a surprisingly long distance to come,” he says. So he used computer modeling to parse the clues, running through 40 million settlement simulations. Cox soon pinpointed one that would explain the DNA patterns evident in Madagascar today. Surprisingly, the current population descends primarily from just 30 or so Indonesian women who ...
