“The Dual Origin of the Malagasy in Island Southeast Asia and East Africa: Evidence from Maternal and Paternal Lineages”

Linguistic and archaeological evidence about the origins of the Malagasy, the indigenous peoples of Madagascar, points to mixed African and Indonesian ancestry. By contrast, genetic evidence about the origins of the Malagasy has hitherto remained partial and imprecise. We defined 26 Y-chromosomal lineages by typing 44 Y-chromosomal polymorphisms in 362 males from four different ethnic groups from Madagascar and 10 potential ancestral populations in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We also compared mitochondrial sequence diversity in the Malagasy with a manually curated database of 19,371 hypervariable segment I sequences, incorporating both published and unpublished data. We could attribute every maternal and paternal lineage found in the Malagasy to a likely geographic origin. Here, we demonstrate approximately equal African and Indonesian contributions to both paternal and maternal Malagasy lineages. The most likely origin of the Asia-derived paternal lineages found in the Malagasy is Borneo. This agrees strikingly with the linguistic evidence that the languages spoken around the Barito River in southern Borneo are the closest extant relatives of Malagasy languages. As a result of their equally balanced admixed ancestry, the Malagasy may represent an ideal population in which to identify loci underlying complex traits of both anthropological and medical interest.

I had understood that the Asian people arrived first, and the Africans joined them about 1000 years later. I think there is archaeological evidence supporting this. The Africans introduced cattle, which the Asians did not have. I had also assumed that the Asians got there more or less directly by boat, but I have never understood how they managed it.

My question – how does the tapeworm history fit with the bottleneck theory for human populations? If humans went through a bottleneck of very small populations, especially for an extended period as has been suggested by some, like Sarah Hrdy, it seems unlikely that the LCA for tapeworms would be hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

As an Indonesian speaker, I have Madagascar on my list of places to visit, but unfortunately the list is a theoretical if-only-I-could one!

From my understanding, most would claim that the people who arrived in Madagascar starting around 2000 years ago were probably a combination of the two BEFORE arrival, rather than arriving in two distinct waves as this article suggests. In other words, some folks from the Indonesia area traveled westward along the coast, past India, to Eastern Africa, and their mixed descendants then headed east to Madagascar. But it is really hard to say how Madagascar was settled, given the lack of archaeological evidence.

Fascinating article nevertheless! Thanks!

I had understood that Madagascar was settled in the past 1500-2000 years or so from what is now Indonesian Borneo. The Malagasy language of the island is most closely related to the language of the Barito area in southern Borneo. This is part of the most widespread (pre-modern) language group in the world, the Austronesian group, stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island.

Am I a Luddite if I hate the word “hominins”?

(Also: You might fix “riduclously” in the next to last graf, and then delete this part of this comment.)