New palaeozoogeographical evidence for the settlement of Madagascar

Abstract

The island of Madagascar split from the African mainland some 50 million years ago, considerably prior to the evolution of humans and indeed primates. Its isolation permitted the evolution of a complex endemic flora and a fauna dominated by lemurs, whose nearest relatives are the lorises and galagos on the African and Asian mainland. Some 35% of the flora and 90% of the fauna are endemic, occurring nowhere else in the world. The absence of human populations for virtually all of this period permitted the development of ‘naive’ species, susceptible to both predation from humans and competition from other animals, wild and domestic. However, at first European contact, Madagascar had already been settled by an agricultural population and was fully integrated into long-distance Indian Ocean trading networks. In the early eighteenth century, the Dutch scholar Adriaan van Reeland recognised the relatedness of Malay, Malagasy and Polynesian, and concluded that Madagascar had been settled by speakers of an Austronesian language (Relandus 1708). As a consequence, the origin of the peoples of Madagascar and the date of their arrival has long been a subject of interest. One potential source of information are the early records of the East African coast. These date from the classical period, although are often difficult to interpret (Horton 1990; Wrigley 1997). The main sources are; On the Erythrean Sea by Agatharchides of Cnidus (Burstein 1989), the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989), the Natural History of Pliny (Rackham 1942) and the Geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus (Stevenson 1932). Needless to say, the dating of these is controversial (Mathew 1975) but the scholarly consensus would order them as follows: