Madagascar: The Island That Evolution Forgot — In the Best Way
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Madagascar broke away from mainland Africa approximately 165 million years ago and drifted to its current position in the Indian Ocean, where its biological isolation allowed species to evolve in directions impossible on the mainland. Over 90 percent of Madagascar's wildlife is found nowhere else on earth. The lemurs — primates that evolved in isolation after arriving on the island on floating vegetation millions of years ago — are the most famous example: over 100 species ranging from mouse lemurs weighing 30 grams to the indri, whose haunting wailing calls carry for kilometres through the forest.
The Famadihana — the turning of the bones — is a burial ritual of the Merina people of the highland plateau that no other culture practises in the same form. Family tombs are opened every five to seven years, the remains of ancestors are rewrapped in fresh silk shrouds, and carried around the tomb to music, dancing, and celebration. The dead are not gone. They are members of the family who have transitioned to a different state, and maintaining the relationship with them — through ceremony, conversation, and the physical act of rewrapping — is a serious obligation. Outsiders find it astonishing. Malagasy people find it obvious.
The Baobab trees along Madagascar's Avenue of the Baobabs are among the most photographed trees on earth — ancient giants with swollen trunks storing water through the dry season, some over a thousand years old, their upper branches like roots reaching into the sky. The Malagasy people consider baobabs sacred, and local prohibitions on cutting them have preserved trees that industrial agriculture would otherwise have removed.
