The fourth largest island on Earth, separated from other landmasses for tens of millions of years and settled by humans only about 1,300–1,500 years ago — by Austronesian seafarers from Southeast Asia and Bantu-speaking peoples from East Africa — making it both an extraordinary laboratory of isolated evolution and the destination of one of history's most astonishing long-distance migrations, now facing severe deforestation and extinction.
Something remarkable happened in the Indian Ocean roughly 1,300 to 1,500 years ago. Seafarers tied linguistically to Island Southeast Asia, especially the Borneo-Malay world, crossed or staged their way across the Indian Ocean and reached what was probably one of the last large uninhabited islands on Earth. They found lemurs watching from the trees, birds that could not fly and stood taller than a person, giant tortoises moving across the ground. The island had been cut off from other landmasses for tens of millions of years. Its living world was unlike anything the newcomers had ever seen. Those arrivals, and the East African peoples who came alongside or soon after, became the ancestors of the Malagasy — a people speaking an Austronesian language on an island a short distance from Africa. Madagascar is where two of the biggest stories in natural and human history meet in the same place, and where both are now at risk.