"The ancestors have spoken during the Holiest of Moons, no more shall we meander the north lands. The captain has lost himself in exotic objects and sells our daughters and sons to foriegn men for favor. He has lost his ways and apes that of the Fragrant Peoples with much merriment.
Tonight we rise sturdy as the mast, tomorrow we catch the winds of our own destinies!"
-Green Forest "Mother-Of-Us-All"
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Madagascar as the story goes or at least has gone is a subcontinental island off the coast of Southeast Africa. Isolated for millions of years it was a pristine rainforest that in its luxuriance brought about endemicy unlike anywhere else on earth.
Relatively recent in settlement (10-14th century), the island was steadfastly iron age and rice farming in its formation; created by southeast Asians who went on to enslave Bantu from Mozambique who introduced cattle husbandry.
These peoples very quickly went about an environmental blitzkrieg of epic proportion destroying in less than a thousand years 85% of forest cover as well as caused the extinction of a number of birds; the largest never before seen by humanity as well as pygmy Hippos, giant tortoises and lemurs species whose form and functions mimicked that of monkeys, gorillas and sloths.
This story of OTL Madagascar of course is much more complicated.
Recent
subfossil findings show intentional cut marks from tools on the bones of extinct animals have strongly suggested a human population some two thousand years older than previously thought.
While assumed to be "Hunter gatherers" (given the lack of grains in the archeological record) evidence shows
cannabis pollens in the highlands around 700-900 years earlier than the suggested timeline shows horticultural knowledge.
The estimated
90% forest cover was not in fact shown to be such, rather environmental mosaics and natural fires and landslides created a much more varied and diverse range of ecosystems.
Human modification while marked was not nearly as systematic.
Unlike in New Zealand where there are thousands of hacked bones from Moa,
Madagascar has few examples of human modified elephant bird bones. A prevailing belief is a chicken derived diseases wiped them out along with vegetation shifts and human gathering of eggs.
Linguists such as Adelaar and Blench believe the proto-malagasy language and people with its borrowings swahili as well as cushitic and a yet unknown language were already mixed before settlement of the island.
Later migrations from Srivijaya, India, Arabia and Southeast Africa created a number of variants within a rather cohesive Malagasy body of peoples from Antemoro who are of Arab ancestry to the Betsimisaraka's zana-malata who descend from European pirates.
But most strangely and rarely noted within the genetics of islanders there exists "Polynesian" motifs that's distribution begins in the easternmost of Indonesia near Papua, far from the supposed Austronesian homeland as well as specific Malagasy motifs such as a variant of M29 found no where else on earth shows exceptional time lapse but also a retelling of who the first Malagasy actually were.
The Merina stories of the Vazimba short & black farmers with kingdoms ruled by women such as the earliest recorded Queen Rangita ("Kinky Hair") are turning out to be closer and closer to fact.