Page 236 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

This evidence supports the claim that the language used by the Malagasy tribe in
Madagascar is related to the languages found in Indonesia. There is also genetic evidence
for the Kalimantan origin of the Malagasy people. Another interesting paper in genetics was
Hurles et al. (2005) which looked at genetic evidence for the dual origin of the Malagasy in
island Southeast Asia and East Africa. Using the Y-chromosome from the paternal lineage
and mitochondrila DNA from the maternal lineage, the gene pool of modern Malagasy
inhabitants can be determined, and also their geographic origin.
The inhabitants of Malagasy had a mixed origin from East Africa and Southeast Asia.
The inhabitants of Malagasy did not show the kind of inherited genetic diversity
as found in the inhabitants in the newly inhabited small islands such as the islands in
southwest Pacific. Rather, they must have had a migration history which was direct and
not gradual with each migration bringing different descendants. The diversity of genes
from the maternal lineage of Asian mothers was higher than that of African mothers. This
showed that the migration from Indonesia was more dominant than that from Africa.
The distribution of Y chromosomes of Malagasy inhabitants was more similar to that of
the people in Banjarmasin in Kalimantan than any other Austronesian group. It is thought
that the migration from Kalimantan took place around 500 AD (Bellwood, 2006). The most
likely route was around the coast via Sri Lanka and India, given their seafaring ability.
There are two main views about the origins of the Austronesians. The out of Taiwan
view is that the Austronesians originated in Taiwan and spread southward via the
Philippines, spreading out later throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Thereafter, they
spread eastward towards and into the Pacific and south as far as New Zealand (Bellwood,
2006). The other view is that the Austronesians originated in the Wallacea region in
Indonesia, from where they spread out due to the Quarterly transgression (Oppenheimer
and Richards, 2001) .
Geology can make a contribution questions of migration and dispersal of the ancestors
of the Austronesians by looking at how supportive different environments would have been
at different points of time. Evidence comes from paleoclimatology and paleogeography.
If we would like to understand the origin of a nation its ethnogenesis, there are four fields
which can be useful: geology, archeology, linguistics, and genetics.

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