Who were the original settlers of Madagascar - Maya (warning, long post)

While linguistic, DNA, archeological and ethnographic analysis has all confirmed that the indigenous Malagasy people are descendants of mixed eastern African and Indonesian/southeast Asian ancestry, how exactly the island was originally settled has remained a scientific and historical mystery. We do know that specific African and Indonesian DNA lineages are common to all the Malagasy ethnic groups screened to date, which suggests that the African and Indonesian populations mixed very early in the history of Madagascar. The first written records confirming civilization on Madagascar do not appear in the historical record until 1165, when Arab geographer ad-Idrisi mentioned the island and its people in his work. Researchers have hypothesized that Madagascar might have been formally colonized by people of the Srivijaya Empire, which was centered on the island Sumatra of Indonesia, and included modern Java and Malaysia. The empire was powerful in southeastern Asia between the 7th and 13th centuries, and controlled maritime trade in the region. Malagasy contains loan words from Javanese and Malay, as well as Javanese and Malay modified Sanskrit, connections that support the Srivijaya colonization hypothesis. Linguistically, however, Malagasy’s closest relative is Ma’anyan, a language of the Bornean southeastern Barito River valley. This presents a slight puzzle, because today the speakers of Ma’anyan live in an inland region that “offers little ethnographic or historical evidence for any sort of maritime tradition.”

 In the late 2000s, an international group of researchers lead by molecular biologist Murray Cox performed extensive mtDNA analysis and created a genetic model of the initial settlement of Madagascar, shedding more light on one of the greatest remaining mysteries of human expansion. Cox et al. screened 2,745 Indonesians from 12 islands of the archipelago. They found a low frequency of the Malagasy’s ancestral Polynesian motif (mtDNA haplotype B4a1a1) in Indonesia today (2%). They also found two additional mutations in Malagasy Polynesian motif, which occurred in every person carrying the Polynesian motif. They called this the Malagasy motif. Of the 2% of Indonesians carrying the Polynesian motif, none carried the two mutations that categorize the Malagasy motif. The researchers’ statistical simulation model suggests that Madagascar was settled around 830 AD, which was also the height of the Srivijaya Empire. The island was settled by approximately 30 women, 93% of whom had Indonesian ancestry (mtDNA analysis only traces female lineages, so it is assumed that there were also some number of men). While this may seem like a very small number, researchers estimate that New Zeeland was settled by about 70 women. The small number of original settlers, and the fact that there were 30 women, suggests that the island was not officially colonized by maritime traders, who were male. The female presence also draws into question the hypothesis that an Indonesian long distance trading vessel got off course and wrecked on Madagascar. Perhaps the model actually raises more questions than answers, such as when the Indonesians mixed with peoples of eastern African descent, and how it is that Malagasy genetics suggest that hat 30 women founded the island.

 Check out the 2012 research paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. for more details:

 Cox, M. P., Nelson, M. G., Tumonggor, M. K., Ricaut, F., & Sudoyo, H. (2012). A small cohort of Island Southeast Asian women founded Madagascar. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1739), 2761-2768. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0012