The settlement of Madagascar
定居马达加斯加
Thirty lost souls.
三十个迷失的灵魂。
How Africa s largest island was colonised by Asians.
解读非洲第一大岛成为亚洲人殖民地的历史。
MADAGASCAR is renowned for its unusual animals, particularly its lemurs, a group ofprimates extinct elsewhere on the planet. Its human population, though, is equallyunusual. The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliestmigrants in the middle of the first millennium AD. Moreover, despite Madagascar s proximityto Africa those settlers have long been suspectedof having arrived from the Malay Archipelago-modern Indonesia-more than 6,000km away.
马达加斯加岛因岛上的稀有动物而闻名,尤其是世界其他地方已绝迹的灵长类动物狐猴。人类在该岛定居的历史,也同样不寻常。该岛是最后几个人类选择的定居地之一,于公元后头一个千年的中叶迎来了最早一批到此定居的移民。此外,尽管马达加斯加岛毗邻非洲大陆,长久以来外界猜测岛上的居民是从马来群岛,即现在的印度尼西亚,这个6000多公里外的地方迁移来的。
There are three reasons for this suspicion. First, it has been recognised for centuries thatthe Malagasy language, though distinct, borrows a lot of words from Javanese, Malay andthe tongues of Borneo and Sulawesi. Second, the islanders culture includes artefacts rangingfrom boats with outriggers to xylophones, and crops such as bananas and rice, that are characteristically Asian, not African. And third, genetic evidence haslinked the modern Malagasy with people living in eastern Indonesia as well as farther off inMelanesia and Oceania.
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