"This is interesting but hardly news. It has been well established for a long time that Madagascar was settled by people from the Indonesian region bith linguistically and by the presence of a whole suite of Asian plants such as bananas, sugar cane and Asian yam.
Bernard"

Well I was aware of the bananna evidence but not sugar cane and yams nor the linguistic evidence. From what I read the bananna evidence dated back more than 3000 years so I am curious about the 2000 year date for the DNA evidence. Apparently there was a substantial migration of males (Y chromosome data).

What intriques me about this discovery is the implied navigational capabilities. Were these southeast asians setting out into the open ocean or were they hugging the coast of India and Africa? Did they venture up into the Persian Gulf? There might be more surprises!

btw, I finally got your book. Unfortunately now that it doesn't get dark till 8:30, I haven't have had time to get very far into it yet!