MADAGASCAR: This island nation is 300 miles from the coast of Africa and 3,700 miles from Southeast Asia, but the people there speak Malagasy, an Austronesian language related to Malay and Hawaiian. This suggests that the island was colonized around 1,200 years ago from across the Indian Ocean, but until now there was no physical evidence to back up the linguistic and genetic data. Recently excavated botanical remains have provided the first tangible link—the remains of Asian crops, including rice and cotton—at sites there and on the Comoros islands closer to the African mainland. —Samir S. Patel