Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 6635–6640 (2016)

Madagascar is only 500 km from continental Africa, yet linguistic, ethnographic and genetic evidence point to the island's colonization sometime in the first millennium ad by groups from Southeast Asia, 6,000 km away. A new study by Alison Crowther of the University of Queensland, Australia and colleagues provides the first archaeological evidence in support of this colonization, using analysis of ancient crop remains.

Credit: © ULRICH HOLLMANN/MOMENT/GETTY

Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, is most similar to Austronesian languages such as Hawaiian, Māori and Malay, rather than East African languages, and now it seems that early Malagasy crops also reflect a Southeast Asian origin. Crowther and her team collected archaeobotanical samples at settlements in Madagascar and contemporaneous sites on the African mainland, dated to between 650–1200 AD. They found a distinctive signature of Asian crops (Asian rice, mung bean and cotton) at the Malagasy sites, and few of the African crops (sorghum, cowpea, baobab and African millets) common at sites in Kenya and Tanzania.

Crowther and her team also found Asian crops in the Comoros islands 300 km off the coast of Madagascar, in earlier deposits. This suggests that the Comoros islands could have paved the way for the colonization of Madagascar by Southeast Asian peoples.