Pertanyaan

A.D. 830: A storm sends an Indonesian trading ship drastically off course. Months later, does of ragged survivors make landfall on an island off the southeast coast of Africa, more than 3,000 miles from home. Today, Murray Cox, a computational biologist at New Zealand Masses University, says a scenario like this may describe.the gloomy origins of the.first permanent settlement on. Madagascar, home to about 22 million people-today. linguistic studied suggest the islands native Malagasy-people are mainly of Indonesian descent. The idea of early Indonesians traveling 3,000 miles to the island intrigued Cox. Its a surprisingly long distance to come, he says. So he used computer modeling to purse the clue, running through 40 million settlement simulations. Cox soon pinpointed one that would explain the una pattern evident in Madagascar today. Surprisingly, the current papulation descends primarily from just 30 or so Indonesian women what lived 12 ceinturies ago. His conclusion is supported by prior finding that about 30 percent of Malagasy have the same mitechondrial una, which is passed from mother to child-far less diversity than in typical human populations, which share less than 2 percent. This suggests rapid, recent growtg from a very small founded populations, Cox says It is unclear how Madagascars founding mothers (and the fathers who must have been with them) arrived. Cox,proposed scafaring merchants throws off course, or refugees fleeing political strive; the latter could explain why women, usually not found on trade ships, were on board. Now, Cox plans to explore whether small founding groups are characteristics of other early island settlement, including Hawaii. Ther rules for settling islands, he save The passage implies that Indonesian settlers in Madagascar most.probably