Who left the dogs out? No trace of ancient colonizers' canines in Madagascar

Their migration spanned half the globe and their culture was spread across the Pacific and Indian Oceans; but in Madagascar, the ancient Indonesians left behind a mystery.

What happened to their dogs?

In his latest research on the origins of dogs around the world, Peter Savolainen, a canine genealogy authority at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology, set out to examine the genetic connection between dogs in Madagascar and the pets of ancient settlers from Indonesia. But to his team's surprise, no trace of Indonesian ancestry could be found among the island nation's dogs.

Instead, Madagascan dogs all appear to trace their heritage entirely from Africa.

Savolainen says that the findings offer little clue as to what happened to the Indonesian dogs that most likely sailed to Madagascar 1,500 to 2,000 years ago.

"It's a mystery," Savolainen says of the study, which sampled DNA of 145 dogs from Madagascar and 184 from the African mainland. "We were surprised when we saw the results. We expected 100 percent or 50 percent ancestry from Indonesia -- but it was zero percent."

In ancient times, the expeditions of Indonesians typically included domestic animals, such as pigs, chickens, and of course, man's best friend. Along with their Austronesian culture and DNA, the Indonesians introduced their dogs' genes into populations wherever they settled. This canine DNA can still be found in Hawaii, Southeast Asia, the Cook Islands and New Zealand, among other places.

"Dogs, together with pigs and chicken, were important domestic animals in the Austronesian culture," he says. "So it would be expected that dogs were brought in the colonization of major new areas, and a seemingly total absence in Madagascar of dogs with Austronesian heritage is surprising.

One possible explanation doesn't quite hold up, Savolainen says. If the migration from Indonesia to Madagascar was "a limited event" which brought only a small number of colonizers in a few voyages, then why does the human population of the island have such a high diversity of maternal and paternal lineages with Indonesian origin?

"This indicates that there was an introduction of large numbers of people, possibly in several successive waves rather, than a severe genetic bottleneck in the founder population," he says.

Savolainen offers a more likely, if unappealing scenario. "It is possible that if the dogs were brought along on these long journeys, they died from the hardship, or were used as a food source."

Indonesian dog DNA isn't the only missing trace of the Indonesian diaspora in Madagascar. As Savolainen points out, the Madagascan culture is mainly influenced by Africa and, except for the language, few clear contributions remain from the initial Indonesian culture."

The study was published on May 20 in Royal Society Open Science. It was co-authored by Savolainen with colleagues from KTH, as well as Université d'Antananarivo, Madagascar; Stellenbosch University, South Africa; National Institute of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (NIGEB), Iran; and University of Porto, Portugal.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2015. “Who left the dogs out? No trace of ancient colonizers' canines in Madagascar”. Science Daily. Posted: May 20, 2015. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520083308.htm

Human occupation of Madagascar pushed back 2500 years

Past research concludes that human occupation of Madagascar was established around 500 C.E. in village communities by people of both Indonesian and East African heritage. Evidence for earlier visits is scattered and contentious, but recent archaeological excavations in northern Madagascar reveals a site containing microlithic stone technologies related to foraging for forest and coastal resources.

A flawed chronology

The evidence for human occupation prior to 500 C.E. does exist but is mainly circumstantial. Pollen and charcoal from fires suggest vegetation change linked to human activity around 2000 years ago, while cut-marks on animal bones push the date back to 400 BCE and possibly as far back as 2200 BCE. But until now there were few artefacts that could be used to establish the presence of humans on Madagascar.

The new study examined a rock shelter where the researchers – led by the late Robert E. Dewar of Yale University -  unearthed scores of flaked stone items made from materials brought from some distance away.

“Flaked stone items recovered primarily from washing and sorting are very small, a majority from a range of crypto-crystalline silicates, which we term ‘chert,’ and a minority of a volcanic glass which we term ‘obsidian’,” the authors write, noting that there are no known sources of obsidian in northern Madagascar. “Some of the fragments and flakes have pot-lid scars attributable to either deliberate heating, which improves flaking, or accidental burning.”

Using carbon dating techniques, the researchers were able to place an age on the stone tools of 3,500 to 4,400 years, corresponding to approximately 1460-2370 BCE. They also bear a striking resemblance to artefacts from this period found in Africa, the Middle East, and South-east Asia.

Intermittent occupation

The researchers say the results provide evidence of “intermittent occupation by small groups engaged in foraging” at the site.

This foraging occupation of one site effectively doubles and confirms the length of Madagascar’s known occupational history and thus the time during which people exploited its environments.

The rock shelter yielded a stratified assemblage with small flakes, microblades, and retouched crescentic and trapezoidal tools, probably projectile elements, made from cherts and obsidian, some brought more that 200 km.

The assemblage from the top layers of the site is well dated to 1050–1350 A.D. This was achieved using carbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), as well as ceramic typology imported from the Near East and China.

Below this layer is a series of stratified assemblages with carbon dating and OSL indicating occupation from at least 2000 B.C.

Faunal remains reveal a foraging pattern of hunting parties active in Madagascar long before the arrival of farmers and herders and before many Late Holocene faunal extinctions.

A biodiversity hotspot

Madagascar split from India around 88 million years ago, allowing native plants and animals to evolve in relative isolation. Consequently, Madagascar became a biodiversity hotspot with over 90 percent of its wildlife found nowhere else on Earth. The island’s diverse ecosystems and unique wildlife are threatened by the encroachment of the rapidly growing human population.

The unique evidence collected by the researchers regarding extinction of mega fauna, such as gorilla sized Lemurs, shows that this occurred long after initial human arrival on the island and although later activities were clearly involved, the specific causes and pattern remain to be fully understood.

More generally, the view that Madagascar’s history can be sharply divided by the arrival of humans between an undisturbed Eden and anthropogenic disaster is no longer tenable.

The researchers conclude that more archaeological research is required to locate and excavate more of these forager sites and to understand “the chronology, origins, geographic spread, and environmental impacts of the human occupation of Madagascar”.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2013. “Human occupation of Madagascar pushed back 2500 years”. Past Horizons. Posted: August 14, 2013. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/08/2013/human-occupation-of-madagascar-pushed-back-2500-years

Madagascar Founded By Women

The discovery negates a prior theory about how the island was first found.

Madagascar was first settled and founded by approximately 30 women, mostly of Indonesian descent, who may have sailed off course in a wayward vessel 1200 years ago.

The discovery negates a prior theory that a large, planned settlement process took place on the island of Madagascar, located off the east coast of Africa. Traditionally it was thought to have been settled by Indonesian traders moving along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

Most native Madagascar people today, called Malagasy, can trace their ancestry back to the founding 30 mothers, according to an extensive new DNA study published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B,. Researchers focused on mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mothers to their offspring. Scientists assume some men were with the women.

“I’m afraid this wasn’t a settlement by Amazon seafarers!” lead author Murray Cox told Discovery News. “We propose settlement by a very small group of Indonesian women, around 30, but we also presume from the genetics that there were at least some Indonesian men with them. At this stage, we don’t know how many.”

Cox, a senior lecturer at Massey University’s Institute of Molecular BioSciences, and his colleagues analyzed genetic samples from 2745 individuals hailing from 12 Indonesian archipelago island groups. They then compared the results with genetic information from 266 individuals from three Malagasy ethnic groups: Mikea hunter-gatherers, semi-nomadic Vezo fishermen and the dominant Andriana Merina ethnic group.

Many Malagasy carry a gene tied to Indonesia. The DNA detective work indicates just 30 Indonesian women founded the Malagasy population, with a much smaller biological contribution from Africa. The women may have mated with their male Indonesian travel companions, or with men from Africa.

“The small number of Indonesian women is consistent with a single boatload of voyagers,” Cox said, adding that “typical Indonesian trading ships in the mid first millennium A.D. could hold around 500 people. “

The distance between Indonesia and Madagascar is close to 5000 miles, so the women and their travel mates must have had quite a journey, especially if it was unintended.

“The small founder population of Indonesian women makes this scenario fairly unlikely,” Cox said. “Instead, our new evidence favors a small movement of people, and perhaps even an unplanned crossing of the Indian Ocean.”

Scant archaeological evidence, consisting of a few bones marked by stone tools and an increased rate of forest fires, suggests people may have first visited, but not settled, Madagascar around 2000 years ago. Even that is very recent in terms of overall human history.

Madagascar was one of the last places on earth to have been settled, with remote islands like New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island being in the short group of places that were settled later -- about 900 years ago.

“Our best argument is that these islands were just extremely difficult to get to,” Cox said.

Matthew Hurles, a senior group leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, has also studied the genetic heritage of Madagascar’s native people. He and his team also noted the Indonesian connection.

"Malagasy peoples are a roughly 50:50 mix of two ancestral groups: Indonesians and East Africans,” Hurles said. “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."

Cox concluded, “It is worth emphasizing that Madagascar wasn’t a ‘sealed box’ after its initial settlement. There are notable later contributions by Africans, Arabs and Europeans. All of these contributions show up in the DNA of Malagasy today.”
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References:

Viegas, Jennifer. 2012. "Madagascar Founded By Women ". Discovery News. Posted: March 20, 2012. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/madagascar-women-120320.html