Early period
Most archaeologists estimate that the earliest settlers arrived in outrigger canoes from southern Borneo in successive waves throughout the period between 350 BCE and 550 CE, making Madagascar one of the last major landmasses on Earth to be settled by humans. Upon arrival, early settlers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture to clear the coastal rainforests for cultivation. The first settlers encountered Madagascar's abundance of megafauna, including giant lemurs, elephant birds, giant fossa and the Malagasy hippopotamus, which have since become extinct due to hunting and habitat destruction. By 600 CE groups of these early settlers had begun clearing the forests of the central highlands. Arabs first reached the island between the seventh and ninth centuries, and a wave of Bantu-speaking East African migrants arrived around 1000 CE and introduced zebu, a type of long-horned humped cattle, which were kept in large herds.
Irrigated rice paddies emerged in the central highland Betsileo Kingdom by 1600 and were extended with terraced paddies throughout the neighboring Kingdom of Imerina a century later. The rising intensity of land cultivation and the ever-increasing demand for zebu pasturage in the central highlands had largely transformed the central highlands from a forest ecosystem to grassland by the 17th century. The oral histories of the Merina people, who may have arrived in the central highlands between 400 and 1000 years ago, describe encountering an established population they called the Vazimba. Probably the descendants of an earlier and less technologically advanced Austronesian settlement wave, the Vazimba were expelled from the highlands by Merina kings Andriamanelo, Ralambo and Andrianjaka in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Today the spirits of the Vazimba are revered as tompontany (ancestral masters of the land) by many traditional Malagasy communities.
Madagascar was an important transoceanic
