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 on Madagascar (later to absorb African admixture). This is not controversial. Rather, when I came to this position with enough solidity I began to look at the cultural anthropology of Madagascar. In particular, what do the Malagasy remember of about their own past in Southeast Asia? From what …