Science and Technolgy.The settlement of Madagascar.Thirty lost souls.How Africa's largest island was colonised by Asians.MADAGASCAR is renowned for its unusual animals, particularly its lemurs, a group of primates extinct elsewhere on the planet.Its human population, though, is equally unusual. The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliest migrants in the middle of the first millennium AD.Moreover, despite Madagascar's proximity to Africa (400km, or 250 miles, at the closest point) those settlers have long been suspected of having arrived from the Malay Archipelago-modern Indonesia-more than 6,000km away.There are three reasons for this suspicion.First, it has been recognised for centuries that the Malagasy language, though distinct, borrows a lot of words from Javanese, Malay and the tongues of Borneo and Sulawesi.Second, the islanders' culture includes artefacts ranging from boats with outriggers to xylophones, and crops such as bananas and rice, that are (or, rather, were then) characteristically Asian, not African.And third, genetic evidence has linked the modern Malagasy with people living in eastern Indonesia as well as farther off in Melanesia and Oceania.Now, Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand and his colleagues have put the matter beyond doubt by showing not only where the first settlers came from, but also how many of them there were.
科技。定居马达加斯加。三十个迷失的灵魂。解读非洲第一大岛成为亚洲人殖民地的历史。马达加斯加岛因岛上的稀有动物而闻名，尤其是世界其他地方已绝迹的灵长类动物――狐猴。人类在该岛定居的历史，也同样不寻常。该岛是最后几个人类选择的定居地之一，于公元后头一个千年的中叶迎来了最早一批到此定居的移民。此外，尽管马达加斯加岛毗邻非洲大陆（最近距离400公里，合250英里），长久以来外界猜测岛上的居民是从马来群岛，即现在的印度尼西亚，这个6000多公里外的地方迁移来的。作此猜测原因有三。首先，存在了几个世纪的一种看法认为，该岛使用的马尔加什语，虽然独特，但很多的词汇是来自爪哇语、马来语和一部分口语来自婆罗洲及苏拉威西岛当地方言。其次，该岛居民的文化――包括从装有舷外浮木的小船到木琴等一系列手工制品，还有一些农作物，如香蕉和大米――都是（也可以说或多或少是、那时候是）具有亚洲特点的，而不是非洲。再次，基因学证据已证明现代的马达加斯加人与东印尼人以及相距更遥远的美拉尼西亚人和生活在大洋洲的人都是有联系的。现在，新西兰梅西大学的Murray Cox和他的同事们不仅科学地展示了首批定居者源自哪里，而且还弄清了定居者的人数，证据确凿。
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