Christmas River

Why this is extraordinary

Madagascar was not on the first human maps. Language, genes, and crops tie the island’s later villagers to two oceans at once, Africa close by and the Austronesian world far to the east. When the first boat came is the fight, and it is now a fight of several thousand years.

At Christmas River, also called Ilakakabe, east of the southern Isalo massif, a wetland preserved a bone bed of extinct animals, among them the elephant birds Aepyornis and Mullerornis. A 2018 study reports cut marks, chop marks, and depression fractures on Aepyornis bones, the kind of damage made in taking a big bird apart. One tibiotarsus, specimen USNM A605209, gave a radiocarbon age of 9428 plus or minus 53 years (UBA-31590) and a second measurement of 9535 plus or minus 70 (Hela-1774). The calibrated span printed beside them is 10,721 to 10,511. A Mullerornis bone from Lamboharana, UBA-29726, measures 5597 plus or minus 40 and calibrates to about 6415 to 6282, with a long thin mark read the same way. The study’s claim is that people were butchering these birds more than 10,500 years ago, some 6,000 years before other archaeological and genetic evidence, and that the lack of villages from that early time may mean the visits were brief, across the Mozambique Channel, rather than a full settlement. No stone tools were in the Christmas River bone bed. The mark is on the bone. The tool is inferred.

The other clock refuses those marks as a colonisation. A large sample of newly excavated megafaunal bone, published the same year, found no butchery until about 1,200 years ago, and it reads the first settlement at about 1,350 to 1,100 years before present, from bone damage, pollen, genes, language, and the practicalities of a crossing. A review the next year, using the standards applied to very early claims in the Americas and in remote Oceania, concludes there is no convincing evidence of settlement before the mid-first millennium CE. The demands are familiar. An undoubted trace, in undisturbed ground, tied to a date on the object itself. The early bones have a date on the object. The argument against them is that a cut can be a cut, or a scrape from trampling, teeth, or the shovel, and that a single marked bone without a camp is a thin colonisation.

The Vazimba belong to the highland telling of “who was here first.” Malagasy historical tradition names them as the earlier people of the interior, later displaced, and their tombs are still treated as places you do not disturb. That tradition is evidence of a memory of predecessors. It does not say those predecessors were the people who marked an elephant bird in the south more than 10,500 years ago. A tomb respected in the highlands and a bone in a southern wetland are the same question only if every “first people” is one people. The genetics and the language point to an Austronesian arrival in the late first millennium CE as the root of the society that told the Vazimba stories. The bone, if it is butchery, is a much older and perhaps unrelated visit.

No source used here aligns a Vazimba tomb, or the Christmas River site, on a star. Malagasy vintana, the calendar of days and directions still used on the island, is a later system. It is not a reading of these bones. The photograph is a 1913 mount of an elephant bird and an egg. It is a stand-in for the animal. It is not specimen USNM A605209.