Madagascar populated from Africa and Indonesia's Kaliamantan: Study
Madagascar populated from Africa and Indonesia's Kaliamantan: Study
Reuters, Washington
The Malagasy people of Madagascar carry the genes from ancestors
in both nearby East Africa and also distant Borneo suggesting a
big migration from Asia back to Africa 2,000 year ago, British
researchers reported on Tuesday.
The genetic study supports the puzzling finding that the
Malagasy language more closely resembles Indonesian dialects than
East African tongues but does little to answer the question of
how the settlers arrived.
Madagascar, the largest island in the Indian Ocean, lies 400
km off the coast of Africa and is 6,400 km from Indonesia.
Its long isolation has led to the evolution of unique animals,
including lemurs, rare birds and plants.
A team of genetics experts at the universities of Cambridge,
Oxford and Leicester looked at both the Y chromosomes of
Madagascar residents, inherited virtually unchanged from father
to son, and the mitochondrial DNA, passed directly from mothers
to their children.
Tiny mutations in these two forms of DNA provide a kind of
genetic clock that can help scientists trace human migration and
inheritance.
The results showed clear similarities to sequences found on
the island of Borneo, now shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and
Brunei.
"The origins of the language spoken in Madagascar, Malagasy,
suggested Indonesian connections, because its closest relative is
the Maanyan language, spoken in southern Borneo," said Matthew
Hurles, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute at Cambridge, who
helped lead the study.
"Malagasy peoples are a roughly 50:50 mix of two ancestral
groups: Indonesians and East Africans. It is important to realize
that these lineages have intermingled over intervening centuries
since settlement, so modern Malagasy have ancestry in both
Indonesia and Africa."
The findings suggest a substantial migration from southeast
Asia between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago, the researchers report in
the American Journal of Human Genetics.