But the finding, based on DNA research by scientists at the Massey University, has only deepened the mystery of "one of the strangest evolutionary events in human history," said a statement from the university on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported.
"It has been known for a very long time that there is a really clear Asian signature in the DNA of Madagascans," said Dr. Murray Cox, of Massey's Institute of Molecular Biosciences, who led a team that screened the DNA of Madagascans and Indonesians to reconstruct the island's early history.
"What we've done is develop a computer model to find out more about that very early settlement history. Our research suggests that around 30 Indonesian women came to the island about 1,200 years ago, around the 9th Century AD," said Cox in the statement.
Almost all Madagascans today were related to those 30 founding women.
"There has been trading along the Indian Ocean for a millennia, and people have assumed that Indonesians settled there as a result of lots of people using this trading route," he said.
"But if it is only 30 individuals, that theory doesn't make sense. So it appears more likely that this may have been an accidental event. It certainly wasn't a big, planned movement of people."
Cox and his team took DNA from 300 Madagascans and nearly 3,000 Indonesians and, over a year and a half, used a specially developed computer model to simulate evolution under various parameters.
Cox said simulations were needed to discover the details of the settlement.
"Just looking at the DNA itself will tell you some things, like the fact there is an Asian connection," he said.
"But what it won't tell you is how many people came and when that happened and what the population size is today. To get that you have to run simulations to figure out what has happened in the past.
"We simulated under a whole range of different demographic models and found one that matched the actual outcome. That gives us a measurement of what the most likely settlement model is."
Cox worked with a team that included researchers from the Eijkman Institute in Indonesia, the University of Arizona and the University of Toulouse.
The research was published in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society B" and was funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
BERNAMA/al
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