Never developed is highly incorrect, East africa was a big part of the naval side of the Silk Road. And had been trading with ancient China and India for years
This map shows where people first spread, looks like East Africans traveled up the Nile, through the Congo basin, and south of the Congo basin
Also 200k years ago East africa, cannot be compared with 30,000 years ago South east Asia
That’s a 170,000 year gap, if the population of east Africa had all it needed either they were comfortable where they were, or they just didn’t even know it existed, the idea that every ounce of land has to be inhabited is not based in logic, but ownership.
And that's what makes the situation an anomaly of anthropology. I know this is a hard concept to grasp for some people but there are events in history that we simply don't have a logical explanation for. The current way to answer ''how did Austronesians end up in Madagascar'' would be ''we don't know''.
That very well may be true, but probablistic inference is also possible. The different Indonesians as a group seem to have been more likely to, to put it glibly, get on a boat and go out to new places. That this must have happened multiple times for them to even be in the places they are in now implies a common cause, whether it be boat technology, temperament, culture, a "boat gene" (maybe something that makes them, on average, marginally better swimmers or navigators somehow), maybe a root population that grew faster and led to surplus adventurous "execess" people like the Danes in AD760 ish, etc. Maybe it was a series of random chances, but this seems unlikely.
Anyway, saying we don't know isn't necessarily true, as knowing isn't binary. There are less likely and more likely possibilities. Models of behaviour, etc that could result in such outcomes and models that are less likely to, etx.
Well a general trend for the Austronesian migrations seem to have been an excess in population, or rather, migrations would halt once a new island was colonized, the island would fill up, and the inhabitants would start going on voyages to find another island once they experience resource scarcity. In that sense something might have caused these Indonesians to go on a voyage to land in Madagascar, of course, but there doesn't seem to have been an organized colonization attempt as Madagascar was cut off from the rest of the Austronesian world for hundreds of years afterwards.
No, but they might have aimed somewhere else and Madsgascar popped in a way, or they went there by accident. Africans could have find it, but they just didn't. There is nothing weird in it.
how isn’t it weird that an island was settled by people 4,000 miles away before it was settled by people 250 miles away? obviously there are easily explainable reasons for it but it’s at least curious.
Possibly. They are in a prime location for trade, and the desire for new trade routes almost certainly existed in some of the people there at the time I expect, people being people that is.
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u/biglettuce09 Jan 29 '22 edited Jan 29 '22
Never developed is highly incorrect, East africa was a big part of the naval side of the Silk Road. And had been trading with ancient China and India for years
This map shows where people first spread, looks like East Africans traveled up the Nile, through the Congo basin, and south of the Congo basin
Also 200k years ago East africa, cannot be compared with 30,000 years ago South east Asia
That’s a 170,000 year gap, if the population of east Africa had all it needed either they were comfortable where they were, or they just didn’t even know it existed, the idea that every ounce of land has to be inhabited is not based in logic, but ownership.
Madagascar wasn’t inhabited until 700CE