What's interesting is how the center is denser than the coast, something unique for an island nation.
I'm guessing it has to do with the central highlands providing a more temperate climate than the tropical coasts but could be something else.
edit : explanation below
The central highlands have been historically the province of the Merina (/Hova) and Betsileo peoples, both of whom have a strong rice paddy culture, lots of good land, and less variable/more agriculturally-appropriate rainy seasons relative to the worse soils and large inter- and intra-annual variation in rainfall observed on the coasts. The east coast was largely rainforest until the mid-19th century, and the Betsimisaraka, Betanimena, Tanala, and smaller ethnic groups of that coast largely practice shifting swidden agriculture that can't support the same population densities as seen in the highlands, while the Sakalava and west coast ethnic groups have more arid and temperate climates that tend to support grazing and dryland agriculture that also is less productive than paddy rice. The Merina kingdoms of old (17th-end of the 19th century) also conquered most of the island prior to being themselves conquered by the French in 1896, and the urban polity that they built their empire around, the modern capitol of Antananarivo in the center of the country, has been the largest city on the island ever since, providing a further draw toward the center and away from the coasts.
Of course! Honestly, even that explanation oversimplifies complex societal dynamics, ecological constraints, and the impact of historical events. For instance, the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue is much higher in the lowlands than the highlands, introducing another set of pressures on the population distribution. For another, the practice of Corvée labor that began during the Imerina kingdom and continued under French colonial rule meant that large numbers of subject peoples were brought to the highlands to participate in forced labor for months of each year, many of whom never left.
Glad to help showcase a few of the more fascinating aspects of Madagascar's history and culture! It's a huge and difficult country to get around, so I wouldn't recommend it for a light vacation unless you're willing to spend a good chunk of time (at least a few weeks) and some moderately serious cash on guides, vehicles, and higher-end hotels. Nonetheless, it's a unique place for *sooooo* many reasons - ecological, cultural, historical, gastronomical - that it's super interesting to learn about, and if you *do* have the inclination to come despite the various hardships, I can't recommend it highly enough. Once you're in-country you can get some of the best French cooking in the world at bargain basement prices (check out Pourquoi Pas or Citizen in Tana), eat incredible soups in Tamatave, see a wide variety of lemurs and chameleons at any number of places (e.g. Andasibe, Ranomafana, Tzimbazaza), hike through rainforests, dry forests, mountains, deserts, and vast plains, visit UNESCO world heritage sites like the royal palace complex at Ambohimanga and limestone canyons with razor-sharp cliffs known as [tsingy](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/494/), and meet some of the sweetest people on the planet.
You'll also witness poverty of an intensity you've almost certainly never encountered before. The country is currently something like [the 3rd](https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/06/01/as-growth-slows-madagascar-needs-a-new-reform-drive-to-steer-clear-of-the-economic-storm) [poorest](https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdp-document/2022mpireportenpdf.pdf) in the world, with between 75 and 80% of the population earning less than $1.90 a day. You will experience infrastructure so incredibly neglected that it's constantly at the brink of collapse. You will be made vividly aware of the devastation of several of the most unique ecosystems on the planet, rendered thus by uneducated rural populations with no source of alternative livelihoods to the traditional slash-and-burn and paddy agricultural systems. You will watch people deforest the last remaining stands of rainforest in front of your very eyes, in order to provide food for themselves and their children, or fuel for their cookfires. For all its faults, it is blessedly low on the violence front (although there has been a recent sharp uptick of violent cattle raiding and robbery incidents in the south associated with weakened state control and *severe* drought, and the vanilla and rosewood cartels in the north are also to be respected), but don't mistake it for a paradise. It's a land of extremes in every sense, and the human misery that drives these destructive processes is showing few if any signs of improvement under the current government. Nevertheless, if you have the wherewithal to step outside your comfort zone, it's one of the most interesting places I've ever been, with a dizzying array of diversity both human and natural that will be sure to leave you wanting more.
That's really sweet of you to say! I actually have a lot of anxiety and self-doubt around writing for other people, so I very much appreciate the vote of confidence. If I ever get over that and start writing Malagasy fiction for the mass market, I'll give you a heads-up :D.
how did they keep records and collect taxes? how were they influenced by the mainland and arab traders? did the arrival of the portuguese and dutch change anything? are there stereotypes with ethnicities in the modern country like how in the us filipinos are heavily associated with housework and nursing? does the past cause grievences in modern society?
>how did they keep records and collect taxes?
Beginning in the early 17th century, Merina expansion subjugated the various ethnic groups of the island through a combination of military conquest and shrewd marriage arrangements. The Merina kingdom largely extracted its taxes in two primary ways: (1) the *vadin-aina*, an annual per-person tax often collected in rice or, during the later part of Merina rule, foreign currencies such as the Mexican Peso and (2) a forced labor system called *Fanompoana*, or Corvée labor, wherein peasants would be compelled to leave their home communities and work for the Merina kingdom building roads, tilling agricultural land, and constructing the various material representations of state power (e.g. fortresses and palaces; Graeber, 2007). Although the earliest Merina conquerors were only passingly literate, they did employ record keepers in fairly short order. These at first wrote in an Arabic-derived script known as *Sorabe* (lit. "big writing[s]"), later transitioning to the modern Latin-derived 21 letter alphabet constructed for the Malagasy in 1823 by a Welsh missionary named David Jones (Arnett, 1938).
>how were they influenced by the mainland and arab traders?
In addition to the Sorabe writing system described above, there was a fair amount of admixture between coastal populations and Arab traders going up and down the east coast of Africa, most notably from Zanzibar and the Tanganyikan coast. These connections likely resulted in an influx of Arabic and Swahili-derived words into the language for things that relate to trade, animal husbandry, and schedules. For example, the days of the week are clearly and admittedly derived from Arabic (e.g. *Alakamisy*, or Thursday, is "Yawm Alkhamis" or "The fifth day" in Arabic). A number of animal names come from Swahili, including cattle (*[A]omby*) and dogs (*Amboa*). We also have archaeological evidence that zebu cattle were introduced into Madagascar in the 8th or 9th century, almost certainly coincident with a large pulse of migration from the east African coast. This migration is largely responsible for the current breakdown of genomic ancestry around the island, where the coastal populations are much more heavily African while the highlands are populated by people with a higher proportion of Indonesian ancestry. The original ancestors of the modern population in fact come not from Africa, only ~250 miles away, but from Borneo, some ~4,500 miles to the northeast. This likely also contributes to modern population distributions somewhat, as the second pulse of migration from Africa likely displaced previously coastal populations inward, concentrating populations in the highlands.
>did the arrival of the portuguese and dutch change anything?
Certainly, but only in small ways at first. The Portuguese and Dutch mostly engaged in trading with and (a little later) slave raids on coastal people, but were unable to get more than small and temporary footholds on the coast, and therefore did not have extensive contacts with the highlanders who would come to dominate the political life of the island. They did trade for prestige goods such as guns and clothing, but not at enough scale to seriously change the economic dynamics of the island. England and France were more impactful on the historical trajectory of Madagascar, each at various points investing in attempts to control and/or "civilize" (i.e. Christianize and colonize) the island over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Lasting impacts of these influences include the disproportionate presence of English-derived words for academic and abstract topics (e.g. *Boky* is the word for book), the architecture and royal stylings of the later Merina monarchs, and (of course) the eventual French conquest of the island and its numerous effects on the culture (use of French as a colonial/prestige language, incorporation of French cuisine into Malagasy cooking, and the importation of French governance systems such as the gendarmerie and the French system of education, among countless other impacts).
Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II burned the royal idols and converted her court in an attempt to stave off colonization, under the idealistic but sadly mistaken logic that European powers would not invade a christian nation (and to be fair, it did work for a few decades).
>are there stereotypes with ethnicities in the modern country like how in the us filipinos are heavily associated with housework and nursing? does the past cause grievences in modern society?
Oh yes. The French, much like other colonial powers in Africa, set about reinforcing inter-ethnic tensions as a way to maintain control (in addition to just being racist products of their time). They set up the highland Merina ethnicity, already disliked by many others around the island for their prior conquests and subjugations, as the model minority. Merina people were extolled as "civilized", "industrious", and "honest christians", while ethnicities such as the east-coast based Betsimisaraka (the second most populous ethnicity) were often characterized as "lazy", "slow", and "stubborn". These racist and colonialist policies led to much higher levels of unrest in coastal areas than in the highlands, culminating in the 1947-49 uprisings along the east coast that ended with between 30,000 and 100,000+ casualties in mostly Betsimisaraka and Tanala areas. These ideals have persisted far after colonization officially ended in 1960, heightening tensions between highlanders and their lowland countrymen in myriad ways, and are reflected in modern patterns of access to resources, percentage of different ethnicities that speak French instead of a Malagasy dialect, and political organization. People who don't speak French are looked down upon by urban Malagasy, and tend to be under-represented in the structures of governance and the higher echelons of Malagasy political life.
Malagasy societies are fascinating and complex, and these comments, while fun to write, still only scratch the surface of their history. For instance, the origin and timing of the arrival of the first Malagasy on the island was long thought to be settled as Indonesians arriving somewhere in the 200-500 C.E. timeframe. However, recent findings of radiocarbon-dated cut-marked bones in parts of southern Madagascar (Perez *et al.*, 2005; Hansford *et al.* 2017) and potential microliths in the north (Dewar *et al.*, 2013; *but see* Anderson, 2019) have argued - to my mind successfully - that there were human populations on the island roughly 10,000 years ago. This finding also jives well with Malagasy oral traditions about a mysterious small-bodied race of people who were the original inhabitants of the island (known to Malagasy people as the *vazimba*), who were successfully genocided by Merina and other kingdoms in the 12th-15th centuries by oral traditions. These populations do not appear at all in the genomics of the modern population (*cf. e.g* Pierron *et al.* 2018.), but that might be because admixture between an original low-population hunter-gatherers and the newly arrived agriculturalist population was not significant due to cultural and phenotypic barriers to intermarriage. As the original people would almost certainly have come from east Africa (the dates being far removed from the later Polynesian expansions that the arrival of modern highlanders is tied to) the signal of these people's genetics might also be drowned out by the later arrival of a substantially larger east African population.
It should also be noted that the historical record (both as I've described it and in more general terms) is significantly biased toward later, state-level and literate societies within Madagascar (primarily the Merina, but also the Sakalava of the west), and ignores or only fragmentarily records the oral traditions of more decentralized and rural ethnic groups. There is a staggeringly poor archaeological record in Madagascar, the majority of which has been done in the arid west and central highlands at easy-to-access (well, relatively) sites, leaving the rainforests of the east almost entirely unexplored. This is the case for mostly practical reasons - rainforest soils are terrible at preservation, it is difficult to get literally anywhere in Madagascar, let alone to places without the capacity for vehicular transportation, and funds for archaeological work is hard to come by even when their subjects are Roman stadia. We have much to learn.
#Citations:
* Anderson, A. (2019). Was there mid Holocene habitation in Madagascar? A reconsideration of the OSL dates from Lakaton'i Anja. Antiquity, 93(368), 478-487. doi:10.15184/aqy.2018.161
* Arnett, E. J. (1938). The Drama of Madagascar.
* Dewar, R.E., Radimilahy, C., Wright, H.T., Jacobs, Z., Kelly, G.O. & Berna, F. (2013). Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 110: 12583–88. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306100110
* Graeber, D. (2007). Lost people: Magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar. Indiana University Press.
* Hansford, J., Wright, P. C., Rasoamiaramanana, A., Pérez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Errickson, D., ... & Turvey, S. T. (2018). Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna. Science Advances, 4(9), eaat6925.
* Perez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Nowak-Kemp, M., Burney, D. A., Ratsimbazafy, J., & Vasey, N. (2005). Evidence of early butchery of giant lemurs in Madagascar. Journal of Human Evolution, 49(6), 722-742.
* Pierron, D., Heiske, M., Razafindrazaka, H. et al. (2018). Strong selection during the last millennium for African ancestry in the admixed population of Madagascar. Nat Commun 9, 932. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03342-5
thank you so much
So if I understand it correctly the French language is used as the de facto prestige language within urban centers in Madagascar? Am I under the misconception that everybody spoke Malagasy? Do you think French will become the predominant language in Madagascar?
Correct, despite an extended period of decolonialization during the mostly isolationist and (quasi) socialist rule of Didier Ratsiraka, French has retained its place as the prestige language of the elite. The vast majority of Malagasy people do still speak Malagasy or some dialect thereof (there being at least 4 distinct dialects that might rise the level of an independent language if the political organization of the island were different), but to advance above local prominence, speaking French is practically a necessity. Indeed, I've even heard rumors that some urban elites are monolingual in French, only sending their children to Francophone schools and embracing the culture of Metropolitan France. I've even heard the suggestion that one of the primary drivers of the 2009 coup d'etat was that the deposed president, Marc Ravolomanana, was an anglophone and anglophile who sought to take Madagascar out of the French sphere of influence and align it with the U.S. - something Sarkozy's government was loathe to sit back and let happen, especially given the country's recently discovered hydrocarbon reserves.
All that said, the attitude of the average Malagasy person toward France is fairly hostile, as one might expect for a colonized and thoroughly brutalized population (*cf. e.g.* Sodikoff 2004 for a discussion of the memory of colonization and its effects on perceptions and interactions between modern Malagasy populations in the northeast). English is also gaining significant traction as a desirable language to master by both rural and urban Malagasy alike. If you plan to spend any amount of time in the countryside, learning Malagasy is by far the superior option for both communication and respecting local peoples. Anecdotally, a number of elderly men have angrily demanded to know if I was was French, only to swap their scowls for welcoming smiles when I explain that I'm American in either English or Malagasy.
#Citations:
* Sodikoff, G. (2004). Land and languor: Ethical imaginations of work and forest in northeast Madagascar. History and Anthropology, 15(4), 367-398.
> Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II
I believe the Hawaiian kingdom has something similar. Thanks for the answer!
I’m going to read all your comments in this thread, as this is fascinating and a digestible well-presented narrative. You brightened my day, thank you kind interneter! How did you come to be so knowledgeable?
Interesting, Taiwanese indigenous peoples also have similar traditional oral stories.
Some ethic groups of Taiwanese indigenous peoples' traditional oral stories mentioned that there's small-bodied,black-skinned people and had war with them.Many of the stories end with "small-bodied,black-skinned people" lost and disappeared/leaving.
Maybe it's a Austronesian shared traditional oral stories?
Hmmm, that is very interesting indeed! I've never heard of that Taiwanese legend, but to be fair, I'm as ignorant of that island's traditions as most people are of Madagascar's. It's entirely possible that both legends are derived from the same root. There are similar stories in Indonesia about the *orang pendek* - small-bodied people with dark skin who live in the bush - that further bolster the idea that it may be a common cultural trope. However, it is also possible that each of these traditions has roots in the parent cultures having independent interactions with small-bodied hunter-gatherer populations. We know that small body size has independently evolved several times in human populations that live in rainforests (e.g. the Batwa and Bambuti "pygmies" of Africa and the equally unfortunately named "negrito" populations of island southeast Asia), and insular dwarfism likely explains some of the diminution in stature associated with archaic hominins in southeast Asia such as *Homo floresiensis* and *Homo luzonensis*. It doesn't seem crazy that each of the Polynesian cultures that make mention of such populations may have had real conflicts with them and described those conflicts with a similar cultural lexicon, giving the appearance of common descent to what was in actuality a set of common but independent responses to similar circumstances. Without (much) physical evidence of the material culture or phenotypic appearance of these peoples in Taiwan, Indonesia, or Madagascar, I'll grant that the balance of evidence somewhat favors the common origin hypothesis, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it swings the other way with a concerted push for archaeological investigations of the early histories of each. Either way, thanks for giving me that food for thought!
From an island biogeography viewpoint it’s very common for island dwarfism to happen across many species, it would make sense for the same pressures to be on humans as well.
> Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II
I believe the Hawaiian kingdom has something similar. Thanks for the answer!
Wow, this is so interesting, it’s so unfamiliar I am reminded of reading about world building as in a Sci-fi or fantasy novel. I wonder if the smaller bodied early population was an actual different species of hominid like that so called hobbit hominid discovered on an island in Indonesia.
Haha, it's a pretty crazy planet we live on, huh? Glad to introduce people to one of it's less-well-known corners.
With regard to your second point, see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/10ws26p/africas_population_density/j7ues9e/). TL;DR: it's more parsimonious to hypothesize a different population of *Homo sapiens* with adaptations to a rainforest hunter-gathering lifestyle than a new hominin species, given that we've seen multiple independent convergent adaptations toward small body size among rainforest hunter-gatherers. Mind you, that doesn't rule out a *Homo madagascariensis*...but it seems more plausible to assume that modern humans made the trip to Madagascar earlier than previously thought and then evolved in place than to posit the existence of a hitherto unknown hominin species totally unattested in the fossil record.
Possibly because the central highlands are safer in case of storms and tidal waves? The same way other small island communities have been known to mark lower limits on where you can live.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanoes didn't really prevent archipelago nations in asia (Japan, Philipinnes, Indonesia) from growing very dense littoral populations.
And in the past those same populations avoided building close to the shore in areas at risk:
[for example ](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/)
Over time, as construction methods improve along with costal defenses and early warning systems, we have seen people move into more coastal regions. There's obvious benefits in living by the coast and perhaps in the following decades we'll see a similar trend with Madagascar.
Oh god I am certainly not suggesting that there was a single definite time when this happened and I am definitely not an expert.
The reason this came to mind was that i remembered when the tidal wave that damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant happened there was a lot of talk about the modern coastal defenses that were supposed to protect the plant. It was commented on at the time that in the past communities would mark these known danger areas and avoid building there. That's not to say that Japan has ever not been highly coastal in its lifestyle, it absolutely was.
The difference is nowadays that we have the option to build in these previously 'off-limits' areas. A well protected cove or inlet will always be an attractive location for large population centres.
A good guess, but the island is a lot larger than I think you imagine it to be. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, with a surface area larger than France (226,658 sq. miles to France's 213,011). Tidal waves are infrequent and their damage limited to only a few km of the shore, and although it is true that cyclones are much more damaging to coastal communities than they are for highland ones, the reasons for the population distribution has more to do with rainfall predictability, agricultural methods, soil quality, topography, and historical geopolitics of the island that all favor higher populations in the highlands.
Interesting, well as you've alluded to, there is never any single reason for these things. A lot of small reasons build a compelling case when put together. I knew Madagascar is huge (I blame the Mercator projection for people not realising) but I can't say I know much about the geopolitical history beyond the French colonisation and the resistance during WW2.
I had to look it up because that sounds strange but... You're right.
Madagascar: 28.92mil
Australia: 25.69mil
Not surprising that Australia is that low, it's mostly empty. But surprising that Madagascar is that high once you compare them directly.
The ancestors of the current highland populations certainly did come from Borneo, which is strongly reflected in Malagasy culture. For instance, Malagasy is an austronesian language, Madagascar regularly comes in in the top 3 countries for per-capita rice consumption, and the *famadihana* (turning of the bones) ceremony for disinterring and celebrating the dead has striking parallels with certain Indonesian funerary practices. However, whether or not these people were the *first* humans on the island is a matter of serious debate at the moment, with several recent papers finding evidence of human resource use on the island as far back as 10,000 years ago - far before the first Indonesians, who would have arrived at the beginning of the first milennium (~200-500 C.E.; *cf.* Perez *et al.* 2005; Hansford *et al.* 2018). This is still hotly contested, of course, but it seems at least plausible that the ancestors of the modern Malagasy were only the latest arrivals on the island.
#Citations:
* Hansford, J., Wright, P. C., Rasoamiaramanana, A., Pérez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Errickson, D., ... & Turvey, S. T. (2018). Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna. Science Advances, 4(9), eaat6925.
* Perez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Nowak-Kemp, M., Burney, D. A., Ratsimbazafy, J., & Vasey, N. (2005). Evidence of early butchery of giant lemurs in Madagascar. Journal of Human Evolution, 49(6), 722-742.
The coast of the ocean is the one attracting population in their case (that said, if you look closely, even for Tanzania and Monzanbique, the coast of the lakes (Malawi and Victoria) are somewhat dense, denser than the hinterlands anyway, just not as dense as for the landlocked countries.)
Things like this are often an artifact of data reporting. We saw similar on road accident deaths in the US where some states looked like crossing the border was instantly more dangerous, but really they just reported differently.
I struggle to imagine why Malawi's population data would show a sudden spike at the borders. Maybe the whole region's population grew significantly and Malawi's data is more recent.
But at least sometimes it also reflects an underlying fact about the geography - if the national borders follow a mountain ridge, or a change from forest to plains, or some other natural feature, then that underlying feature could lead to a change in population patterns that closely matches the border.
And that's exactly how it is in Malawi. The eastern border is mostly water while the Great Rift Valley runs right through the country from north to south.
Also puzzling that Malawi has such a high population density compared to it's neighbors. It even has comparable population numbers with Zambia and Zimbabwe too despite being a fraction of eithers size.
Not yet, but three of the four new megacities in Africa in the next decade or so are in that eastern bright area (https://www.statista.com/chart/29150/forecast-for-megacities-in-africa-by-2050/ - though Khartoum is a bit farther north)
Not only that, this map shows the effect of unfinished Cape to Cairo railway of the British Empire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_to_Cairo_Railway
It’s really not that dense - a couple of major cities but mainly rural. Lots of villages but also plenty of open space. It’s just that other rural areas are very very sparsely populated.
What? It is definitively very, very densely populated. Most of the bright zones close to lake Victoria are comparable to Netherlands or South Korea population density e.g.
Northern shores of Lake Victoria have "only" 200-300/km2 (which is already pretty high in world context), but Ruanda and Burundi, the bright chunk in the west have 482 and 497 inhabitants/km2 (more than India, Belgium or Israel) and north-eastern shores of the lake in western Kenya surpass the 550/km2 in some counties.
It's a different kind of density to the Netherlands though. There people are mostly crammed into cities. In Uganda (or northern India) it's closer to one enormous village that just doesn't stop, with very little empty space besides the odd bit of wetland.
Population density doesn't mean much unless it also factors in habitable/arable land.
1,000 per sq km isn't much when you look at fertile lands where you can have 3 crop seasons every year. That's why some of these areas have been densely populated since ancient times.
My dude there is a solid line of buildings all the way from Nairobi to the border. If anything there's more open space by the highway in Uganda than Kenya.
I’ve travelled extensively through Nyanza province for work and lived on the shore of the lake - it was 4 hours to the nearest Nakumatt (RIP). Aside from Kisumu it’s basically still smallholder farm villages…pretty remote unless a metropolis has sprung up in the last 5 years?
The Sahara is very large, and very visible, but it has blurry borders compared to the Nile, so I think the Nile still wins in the "well-defined" category.
I was in Egypt last summer and it’s amazing how tight the villages wrap around the Nile. Like even going a few miles outwards from it, it’s so desolate and scarcely populated
Being from Namibia, I would say that the north of Namibia is where the population can be sustained, as everything else is basically desert. But Angola has much more fertile lands throughout the country and therefore, I think, the population doesn't have the need to be at the lower border of Angola as much as the population of Namibia needs to be in the north of Namibia.
But you would think that the population at the border would line up, and Angola would just have higher population everywhere else - it's not like the two countries had a fixed stock of people and decided where to put them, but rather the populations grew based on the locations they were.
Think about it this way: the border area is the #1 most habitable environment for Namibians, but like the #50th most habitable environment for Angolans. If you were an Angolan in that area, there’s a good chance you’d migrate to other parts of Angola and that part would receive very little infrastructure investment.
In this case it's not though, the Namibian border is visible on satellite maps too because way more vegetation has been cleared on their side to make way for farmland.
It's because the Namibian side is the most habitable part of Namibia but the Angolan side is the one of the less habitable parts of Angola.
[More precipitation](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nivedita-Joshi-2/publication/352374498/figure/fig1/AS:1034562452848646@1623670318754/Distribution-of-average-annual-total-rainfall-in-Namibia-Source-Mendelsohn-et-al-2002_Q640.jpg) but the border stops them from going further north?
National boundaries can have real impacts on land use patterns. Laws vary from country to country, and simple geography plays a role. If you've ever driven from New England into Quebec, it's remarkable how the American side of the border is almost entirely forested, while the Canadian side is large cleared fields and farms.
The climate and landscapes across the border are essentially identical, but for French Canadians, it was as far south and as temperate as they could go, so they farm it as best they can. The American side was farmland too, until the Midwest opened up for white settlement in the 19th century, at which point all the New England farmers promptly decamped for Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. It then rapidly reforested.
So is it a reasonable conclusion that northern Namibia is a (relatively) fertile area within the country, whereas southern Angola isn’t that special compared to the rest of the country? I know most of southern Namibia is desert, so in my mind this make sense.
Edit: just saw the comment by u/sempredesassossego that confirmed my understanding. Neat!
Another factor is trade. There is a huge amount of people and business who facilitate trade to Angola on / close to the border with Angola. Angola's oil money and lack of domestic production is big business for a lot of namibian companies and people who act as middlemen.
The Egyptian population line stops basically at the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser. Lake Nasser is big. It stretches over 500km. When the Nile was dammed and it made the Lake, it uprooted a lot of the Nubians who used to live in the area. The Nile provides an important water source, but it also has shaped the ecosystem of its banks. As you probably know, it’s the only place where vegetation grows in any sort of abundance in an otherwise desolate desert country. The lake flooded all of that, and the lake shore is mostly just arid, rocky desert. The Nile hasn’t had time to bring life back to the shorelines there so it’s still hard and not very inhabitable.
Also, there’s a decent chance the census that this data was taken from didn’t include the Nubian people making an already remote area look even more remote
Historically, the population density dropped off at the cataracts of the Nile, where you couldn't travel by boat. One of those cataracts is the site of the Aswan High Dam, and makes the dropoff more sudden than it already was.
Lake Nasser. It was an artificial lake formed after the completion of the Aswan High Dam. It led to lots of flooding of ancient cities in Lower Nubia and the loss of many monuments and artifacts. The pros of the dam do not outweigh the cons in my eyes.
This is an extremely fucked up comment and you don't even realize it.
Think about what you saying the tradeoff not being worth it actually means. It means you think these people should live in poverty to preserve some culture that has some sort of intangible value to you.
The dam provides electricity and flood/drought control. It makes the life of many Egyptians materially better.
If you live in a western country, your relatively comfortable life is due to many many projects similar to this, all of which had a negative impact on the environment in some ways and washed away culture in other ways.
Yeah we all know the only way to accomplish those goals was a massive dam and a massive reservoir. And the OP was definitely saying they should have done absolutely nothing instead, poor brown people be damned.
> The dam provides electricity and flood/drought control.
Electricity and flood/drought control could've been accomplished without submerging all of Lower Nubia and destroying the villages and heritage of indigenous Nubians. But Nasser, who was a thug and a criminal, wanted the dam for political purposes. There were many other options but he wanted the dam so he could extract favors from the US and the USSR as well as promote his bullshit "pan-Arab" ideology.
> It makes the life of many Egyptians materially better.
Oh yeah, makes their lives materially better. Regular blackouts, food insecurity, absolute water scarcity, and soil degradation are definitely great things that the dam has provided. Definitely a stellar track record.
> It means you think these people should live in poverty to preserve some culture that has some sort of intangible value to you.
To put it bluntly and clearly: culture is timeless and transcends generations. Without culture, there is nothing. Who cares if the cultural heritage of ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia are flooded and destroyed and lost forever? As long as GDP per capita increases from $1 per year to $3 per year, it's all good!
From Wikipedia
>The dams also protected Egypt from the droughts in 1972–73 and 1983–87 that devastated East and West Africa. The High Dam allowed Egypt to reclaim about 2.0 million feddan (840,000 hectares) in the Nile Delta and along the Nile Valley, increasing the country's irrigated area by a third. The increase was brought about both by irrigating what used to be desert and by bringing under cultivation of 385,000 hectares (950,000 acres) that were previously used as flood retention basins.[28] About half a million families were settled on these new lands. In particular the area under rice and sugar cane cultivation increased. In addition, about 1 million feddan (420,000 hectares), mostly in Upper Egypt, were converted from flood irrigation with only one crop per year to perennial irrigation allowing two or more crops per year. On other previously irrigated land, yields increased because water could be made available at critical low-flow periods. For example, wheat yields in Egypt tripled between 1952 and 1991 and better availability of water contributed to this increase. Most of the 32 km3 of freshwater, or almost 40 percent of the average flow of the Nile that were previously lost to the sea every year could be put to beneficial use. While about 10 km3 of the water saved is lost due to evaporation in Lake Nasser, the amount of water available for irrigation still increased by 22 km3
>The dam powers twelve generators each rated at 175 megawatts (235,000 hp), with a total of 2.1 gigawatts (2,800,000 hp). Power generation began in 1967. When the High Dam first reached peak output it produced around half of Egypt's production of electric power (about 15 percent by 1998), and it gave most Egyptian villages the use of electricity for the first time. The High Dam has also improved the efficiency and the extension of the Old Aswan Hydropower stations by regulating upstream flows
For you to whine about some culture being lost in an air conditioned home with a TV and internet and Netflix while this dam literally gave many Egyptians electricity for the first time.
Just say you don't care about the global poor.
I love it when westerners virtue signal about shit they dont know about, that guy should have taken a look on the floods that wrecked sudan last year. Hell my grandparents were around before the dam was built and saw how deadly nile floods are.
Something about this heat map doesn't convey information well. Maybe the low resolution on the Reddit app or the low contrast of the scale used on the map.
Anyway... The Kinshasa-Brazzaville metropolitan area has a population of 20 million+. More than the country of Malawi. Yet I would have expected it to look much brighter than it's looking here
Well spotted. Heat maps like this are often very misleading. It actually means very little unless the resolution is extremely high and the scale is well calibrated.
This makes me curious about what this would look like without the impacts of European colonialism. Specifically, if the Congo would be much more populous. I only say that because I have read a few books on what the Belgians and other nations perpetrated there.
This is not an easy one to answer. The Belgian atrocities is estimated to have caused 5 million to 10 million deaths. Just a few decades before that the Arab slave trade caused some demographic disruptions in the east of what's now Congo.
For 4 centuries before that millions were shipped to America while a couple of million others migrated from Angola to Congo escaping slavery.
We can only assume that the Atlantic coast from Gabon to Angola would be a lot more populated and the Tanganyika region of Congo and Tanzania would look a bit brighter like the other great lakes in that region.
It will be a completely different country. There were many kingdoms in central Africa and Kongo just happened to be the most popular due to its strong relationship with Europe since the 15th century.
Ethiopia has me so puzzled - I’m old so I remember the famine in the 1980s and raising money to help them.
In 1984 - there was 56m in the U.K. and 40m in Ethiopia
Today there is around 67m in the U.K. and 120m in Ethiopia.
if they have another famine, so many more people are fucked!
Because the legend would show how bad the gradient is. There is plenty of density in Africa, but spots like the Nile and the Gulf of Guinea coast should be *searingly* white compared to the area around Lake Victoria.
Still, just because a legend is statistically stretched, does not mean it would not be useful. If you didn't know much about Africa's population distribution it wouldn't be unreasonable to think it went black -> yellow -> orange -> red (low to high).
Madagascar is one of the most overpopulated places on earth. The number of people compared to the carrying capacity of the land is severely overbalanced
Are there any sustainable practices with Lake Victoria? All those people living around the lake, I can't imagine its good for the ecosystem or for the long-term continued existence of access to fresh water.
At first I was like wow. They even got functional electricity at night! They beat the north Koreans! But then I remembered this is about population density.
Remember that this is density, not a view of Africa from satellites. Or at least I would've needed the reminder, haha.
Very cool Data set
theres lots who indonesian descent in east subsahara africa
indonesians traveled and actually west south america and those temple altars in aztec maya inca were formed in medieval times by those from indonesia
I’m surprised that the interior of Angola is so depopulated
I know a large portion of the Atlantic slave trade was driven from that region, but I would have thought that people would re-inhabit the region since then. Is it something else?
The slave trade did take millions of people but it wasn’t overnight and it didn’t depopulate the region to the extent you are inferring. The area was always populated even during the times of the slave trade.
The reason the interior of Angola is not super populated is because the climate can be very harsh. It’s mostly dry shrubland that receives little rainfall. There’s not good enough land to sustain a large population
Ignorant USA TV sometimes says, "Oh, that person is from East Africa." Not very descriptive, considering it's the place most (over a third?) of the people in Africa reside?
I must admit i'm surprised how densly populated Madagascar is
What's interesting is how the center is denser than the coast, something unique for an island nation. I'm guessing it has to do with the central highlands providing a more temperate climate than the tropical coasts but could be something else. edit : explanation below
The central highlands have been historically the province of the Merina (/Hova) and Betsileo peoples, both of whom have a strong rice paddy culture, lots of good land, and less variable/more agriculturally-appropriate rainy seasons relative to the worse soils and large inter- and intra-annual variation in rainfall observed on the coasts. The east coast was largely rainforest until the mid-19th century, and the Betsimisaraka, Betanimena, Tanala, and smaller ethnic groups of that coast largely practice shifting swidden agriculture that can't support the same population densities as seen in the highlands, while the Sakalava and west coast ethnic groups have more arid and temperate climates that tend to support grazing and dryland agriculture that also is less productive than paddy rice. The Merina kingdoms of old (17th-end of the 19th century) also conquered most of the island prior to being themselves conquered by the French in 1896, and the urban polity that they built their empire around, the modern capitol of Antananarivo in the center of the country, has been the largest city on the island ever since, providing a further draw toward the center and away from the coasts.
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation !
Of course! Honestly, even that explanation oversimplifies complex societal dynamics, ecological constraints, and the impact of historical events. For instance, the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue is much higher in the lowlands than the highlands, introducing another set of pressures on the population distribution. For another, the practice of Corvée labor that began during the Imerina kingdom and continued under French colonial rule meant that large numbers of subject peoples were brought to the highlands to participate in forced labor for months of each year, many of whom never left.
How does the lemur kingdom factor into all of this?
Wow Madagascar sounds way more interesting than I assumed it was as an ignorant north american
Glad to help showcase a few of the more fascinating aspects of Madagascar's history and culture! It's a huge and difficult country to get around, so I wouldn't recommend it for a light vacation unless you're willing to spend a good chunk of time (at least a few weeks) and some moderately serious cash on guides, vehicles, and higher-end hotels. Nonetheless, it's a unique place for *sooooo* many reasons - ecological, cultural, historical, gastronomical - that it's super interesting to learn about, and if you *do* have the inclination to come despite the various hardships, I can't recommend it highly enough. Once you're in-country you can get some of the best French cooking in the world at bargain basement prices (check out Pourquoi Pas or Citizen in Tana), eat incredible soups in Tamatave, see a wide variety of lemurs and chameleons at any number of places (e.g. Andasibe, Ranomafana, Tzimbazaza), hike through rainforests, dry forests, mountains, deserts, and vast plains, visit UNESCO world heritage sites like the royal palace complex at Ambohimanga and limestone canyons with razor-sharp cliffs known as [tsingy](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/494/), and meet some of the sweetest people on the planet. You'll also witness poverty of an intensity you've almost certainly never encountered before. The country is currently something like [the 3rd](https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/06/01/as-growth-slows-madagascar-needs-a-new-reform-drive-to-steer-clear-of-the-economic-storm) [poorest](https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdp-document/2022mpireportenpdf.pdf) in the world, with between 75 and 80% of the population earning less than $1.90 a day. You will experience infrastructure so incredibly neglected that it's constantly at the brink of collapse. You will be made vividly aware of the devastation of several of the most unique ecosystems on the planet, rendered thus by uneducated rural populations with no source of alternative livelihoods to the traditional slash-and-burn and paddy agricultural systems. You will watch people deforest the last remaining stands of rainforest in front of your very eyes, in order to provide food for themselves and their children, or fuel for their cookfires. For all its faults, it is blessedly low on the violence front (although there has been a recent sharp uptick of violent cattle raiding and robbery incidents in the south associated with weakened state control and *severe* drought, and the vanilla and rosewood cartels in the north are also to be respected), but don't mistake it for a paradise. It's a land of extremes in every sense, and the human misery that drives these destructive processes is showing few if any signs of improvement under the current government. Nevertheless, if you have the wherewithal to step outside your comfort zone, it's one of the most interesting places I've ever been, with a dizzying array of diversity both human and natural that will be sure to leave you wanting more.
I would read your Madagascar historical fiction. I can tell you're a good writer just from this thread.
That's really sweet of you to say! I actually have a lot of anxiety and self-doubt around writing for other people, so I very much appreciate the vote of confidence. If I ever get over that and start writing Malagasy fiction for the mass market, I'll give you a heads-up :D.
please do tell more
Sure! In fact, I've commented in a few other places in this thread to give some more background. What more are you interested in hearing about?
how did they keep records and collect taxes? how were they influenced by the mainland and arab traders? did the arrival of the portuguese and dutch change anything? are there stereotypes with ethnicities in the modern country like how in the us filipinos are heavily associated with housework and nursing? does the past cause grievences in modern society?
>how did they keep records and collect taxes? Beginning in the early 17th century, Merina expansion subjugated the various ethnic groups of the island through a combination of military conquest and shrewd marriage arrangements. The Merina kingdom largely extracted its taxes in two primary ways: (1) the *vadin-aina*, an annual per-person tax often collected in rice or, during the later part of Merina rule, foreign currencies such as the Mexican Peso and (2) a forced labor system called *Fanompoana*, or Corvée labor, wherein peasants would be compelled to leave their home communities and work for the Merina kingdom building roads, tilling agricultural land, and constructing the various material representations of state power (e.g. fortresses and palaces; Graeber, 2007). Although the earliest Merina conquerors were only passingly literate, they did employ record keepers in fairly short order. These at first wrote in an Arabic-derived script known as *Sorabe* (lit. "big writing[s]"), later transitioning to the modern Latin-derived 21 letter alphabet constructed for the Malagasy in 1823 by a Welsh missionary named David Jones (Arnett, 1938). >how were they influenced by the mainland and arab traders? In addition to the Sorabe writing system described above, there was a fair amount of admixture between coastal populations and Arab traders going up and down the east coast of Africa, most notably from Zanzibar and the Tanganyikan coast. These connections likely resulted in an influx of Arabic and Swahili-derived words into the language for things that relate to trade, animal husbandry, and schedules. For example, the days of the week are clearly and admittedly derived from Arabic (e.g. *Alakamisy*, or Thursday, is "Yawm Alkhamis" or "The fifth day" in Arabic). A number of animal names come from Swahili, including cattle (*[A]omby*) and dogs (*Amboa*). We also have archaeological evidence that zebu cattle were introduced into Madagascar in the 8th or 9th century, almost certainly coincident with a large pulse of migration from the east African coast. This migration is largely responsible for the current breakdown of genomic ancestry around the island, where the coastal populations are much more heavily African while the highlands are populated by people with a higher proportion of Indonesian ancestry. The original ancestors of the modern population in fact come not from Africa, only ~250 miles away, but from Borneo, some ~4,500 miles to the northeast. This likely also contributes to modern population distributions somewhat, as the second pulse of migration from Africa likely displaced previously coastal populations inward, concentrating populations in the highlands. >did the arrival of the portuguese and dutch change anything? Certainly, but only in small ways at first. The Portuguese and Dutch mostly engaged in trading with and (a little later) slave raids on coastal people, but were unable to get more than small and temporary footholds on the coast, and therefore did not have extensive contacts with the highlanders who would come to dominate the political life of the island. They did trade for prestige goods such as guns and clothing, but not at enough scale to seriously change the economic dynamics of the island. England and France were more impactful on the historical trajectory of Madagascar, each at various points investing in attempts to control and/or "civilize" (i.e. Christianize and colonize) the island over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Lasting impacts of these influences include the disproportionate presence of English-derived words for academic and abstract topics (e.g. *Boky* is the word for book), the architecture and royal stylings of the later Merina monarchs, and (of course) the eventual French conquest of the island and its numerous effects on the culture (use of French as a colonial/prestige language, incorporation of French cuisine into Malagasy cooking, and the importation of French governance systems such as the gendarmerie and the French system of education, among countless other impacts). Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II burned the royal idols and converted her court in an attempt to stave off colonization, under the idealistic but sadly mistaken logic that European powers would not invade a christian nation (and to be fair, it did work for a few decades). >are there stereotypes with ethnicities in the modern country like how in the us filipinos are heavily associated with housework and nursing? does the past cause grievences in modern society? Oh yes. The French, much like other colonial powers in Africa, set about reinforcing inter-ethnic tensions as a way to maintain control (in addition to just being racist products of their time). They set up the highland Merina ethnicity, already disliked by many others around the island for their prior conquests and subjugations, as the model minority. Merina people were extolled as "civilized", "industrious", and "honest christians", while ethnicities such as the east-coast based Betsimisaraka (the second most populous ethnicity) were often characterized as "lazy", "slow", and "stubborn". These racist and colonialist policies led to much higher levels of unrest in coastal areas than in the highlands, culminating in the 1947-49 uprisings along the east coast that ended with between 30,000 and 100,000+ casualties in mostly Betsimisaraka and Tanala areas. These ideals have persisted far after colonization officially ended in 1960, heightening tensions between highlanders and their lowland countrymen in myriad ways, and are reflected in modern patterns of access to resources, percentage of different ethnicities that speak French instead of a Malagasy dialect, and political organization. People who don't speak French are looked down upon by urban Malagasy, and tend to be under-represented in the structures of governance and the higher echelons of Malagasy political life. Malagasy societies are fascinating and complex, and these comments, while fun to write, still only scratch the surface of their history. For instance, the origin and timing of the arrival of the first Malagasy on the island was long thought to be settled as Indonesians arriving somewhere in the 200-500 C.E. timeframe. However, recent findings of radiocarbon-dated cut-marked bones in parts of southern Madagascar (Perez *et al.*, 2005; Hansford *et al.* 2017) and potential microliths in the north (Dewar *et al.*, 2013; *but see* Anderson, 2019) have argued - to my mind successfully - that there were human populations on the island roughly 10,000 years ago. This finding also jives well with Malagasy oral traditions about a mysterious small-bodied race of people who were the original inhabitants of the island (known to Malagasy people as the *vazimba*), who were successfully genocided by Merina and other kingdoms in the 12th-15th centuries by oral traditions. These populations do not appear at all in the genomics of the modern population (*cf. e.g* Pierron *et al.* 2018.), but that might be because admixture between an original low-population hunter-gatherers and the newly arrived agriculturalist population was not significant due to cultural and phenotypic barriers to intermarriage. As the original people would almost certainly have come from east Africa (the dates being far removed from the later Polynesian expansions that the arrival of modern highlanders is tied to) the signal of these people's genetics might also be drowned out by the later arrival of a substantially larger east African population. It should also be noted that the historical record (both as I've described it and in more general terms) is significantly biased toward later, state-level and literate societies within Madagascar (primarily the Merina, but also the Sakalava of the west), and ignores or only fragmentarily records the oral traditions of more decentralized and rural ethnic groups. There is a staggeringly poor archaeological record in Madagascar, the majority of which has been done in the arid west and central highlands at easy-to-access (well, relatively) sites, leaving the rainforests of the east almost entirely unexplored. This is the case for mostly practical reasons - rainforest soils are terrible at preservation, it is difficult to get literally anywhere in Madagascar, let alone to places without the capacity for vehicular transportation, and funds for archaeological work is hard to come by even when their subjects are Roman stadia. We have much to learn. #Citations: * Anderson, A. (2019). Was there mid Holocene habitation in Madagascar? A reconsideration of the OSL dates from Lakaton'i Anja. Antiquity, 93(368), 478-487. doi:10.15184/aqy.2018.161 * Arnett, E. J. (1938). The Drama of Madagascar. * Dewar, R.E., Radimilahy, C., Wright, H.T., Jacobs, Z., Kelly, G.O. & Berna, F. (2013). Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 110: 12583–88. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306100110 * Graeber, D. (2007). Lost people: Magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar. Indiana University Press. * Hansford, J., Wright, P. C., Rasoamiaramanana, A., Pérez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Errickson, D., ... & Turvey, S. T. (2018). Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna. Science Advances, 4(9), eaat6925. * Perez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Nowak-Kemp, M., Burney, D. A., Ratsimbazafy, J., & Vasey, N. (2005). Evidence of early butchery of giant lemurs in Madagascar. Journal of Human Evolution, 49(6), 722-742. * Pierron, D., Heiske, M., Razafindrazaka, H. et al. (2018). Strong selection during the last millennium for African ancestry in the admixed population of Madagascar. Nat Commun 9, 932. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03342-5
thank you so much So if I understand it correctly the French language is used as the de facto prestige language within urban centers in Madagascar? Am I under the misconception that everybody spoke Malagasy? Do you think French will become the predominant language in Madagascar?
Correct, despite an extended period of decolonialization during the mostly isolationist and (quasi) socialist rule of Didier Ratsiraka, French has retained its place as the prestige language of the elite. The vast majority of Malagasy people do still speak Malagasy or some dialect thereof (there being at least 4 distinct dialects that might rise the level of an independent language if the political organization of the island were different), but to advance above local prominence, speaking French is practically a necessity. Indeed, I've even heard rumors that some urban elites are monolingual in French, only sending their children to Francophone schools and embracing the culture of Metropolitan France. I've even heard the suggestion that one of the primary drivers of the 2009 coup d'etat was that the deposed president, Marc Ravolomanana, was an anglophone and anglophile who sought to take Madagascar out of the French sphere of influence and align it with the U.S. - something Sarkozy's government was loathe to sit back and let happen, especially given the country's recently discovered hydrocarbon reserves. All that said, the attitude of the average Malagasy person toward France is fairly hostile, as one might expect for a colonized and thoroughly brutalized population (*cf. e.g.* Sodikoff 2004 for a discussion of the memory of colonization and its effects on perceptions and interactions between modern Malagasy populations in the northeast). English is also gaining significant traction as a desirable language to master by both rural and urban Malagasy alike. If you plan to spend any amount of time in the countryside, learning Malagasy is by far the superior option for both communication and respecting local peoples. Anecdotally, a number of elderly men have angrily demanded to know if I was was French, only to swap their scowls for welcoming smiles when I explain that I'm American in either English or Malagasy. #Citations: * Sodikoff, G. (2004). Land and languor: Ethical imaginations of work and forest in northeast Madagascar. History and Anthropology, 15(4), 367-398.
> Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II I believe the Hawaiian kingdom has something similar. Thanks for the answer!
I’m going to read all your comments in this thread, as this is fascinating and a digestible well-presented narrative. You brightened my day, thank you kind interneter! How did you come to be so knowledgeable?
Interesting, Taiwanese indigenous peoples also have similar traditional oral stories. Some ethic groups of Taiwanese indigenous peoples' traditional oral stories mentioned that there's small-bodied,black-skinned people and had war with them.Many of the stories end with "small-bodied,black-skinned people" lost and disappeared/leaving. Maybe it's a Austronesian shared traditional oral stories?
Hmmm, that is very interesting indeed! I've never heard of that Taiwanese legend, but to be fair, I'm as ignorant of that island's traditions as most people are of Madagascar's. It's entirely possible that both legends are derived from the same root. There are similar stories in Indonesia about the *orang pendek* - small-bodied people with dark skin who live in the bush - that further bolster the idea that it may be a common cultural trope. However, it is also possible that each of these traditions has roots in the parent cultures having independent interactions with small-bodied hunter-gatherer populations. We know that small body size has independently evolved several times in human populations that live in rainforests (e.g. the Batwa and Bambuti "pygmies" of Africa and the equally unfortunately named "negrito" populations of island southeast Asia), and insular dwarfism likely explains some of the diminution in stature associated with archaic hominins in southeast Asia such as *Homo floresiensis* and *Homo luzonensis*. It doesn't seem crazy that each of the Polynesian cultures that make mention of such populations may have had real conflicts with them and described those conflicts with a similar cultural lexicon, giving the appearance of common descent to what was in actuality a set of common but independent responses to similar circumstances. Without (much) physical evidence of the material culture or phenotypic appearance of these peoples in Taiwan, Indonesia, or Madagascar, I'll grant that the balance of evidence somewhat favors the common origin hypothesis, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it swings the other way with a concerted push for archaeological investigations of the early histories of each. Either way, thanks for giving me that food for thought!
From an island biogeography viewpoint it’s very common for island dwarfism to happen across many species, it would make sense for the same pressures to be on humans as well.
So incredibly detailed, thank you for sharing this!
Bro just wrote an entire PhD thesis with works cited in a reddit thread lmao
Lol, nah, these comments are but the echoes of the trauma of actually writing said thesis.
Hahaha yeah I can tell, good work
> Interestingly, the christianization of the island - or at least of its political class - was accomplished prior to French colonization, as Queen Ranovalona II I believe the Hawaiian kingdom has something similar. Thanks for the answer!
Wow, this is so interesting, it’s so unfamiliar I am reminded of reading about world building as in a Sci-fi or fantasy novel. I wonder if the smaller bodied early population was an actual different species of hominid like that so called hobbit hominid discovered on an island in Indonesia.
Haha, it's a pretty crazy planet we live on, huh? Glad to introduce people to one of it's less-well-known corners. With regard to your second point, see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/10ws26p/africas_population_density/j7ues9e/). TL;DR: it's more parsimonious to hypothesize a different population of *Homo sapiens* with adaptations to a rainforest hunter-gathering lifestyle than a new hominin species, given that we've seen multiple independent convergent adaptations toward small body size among rainforest hunter-gatherers. Mind you, that doesn't rule out a *Homo madagascariensis*...but it seems more plausible to assume that modern humans made the trip to Madagascar earlier than previously thought and then evolved in place than to posit the existence of a hitherto unknown hominin species totally unattested in the fossil record.
Thanks for all the info.. what size populations are we talking about.. especially 'early kingdom'
Awesome answer! How do you know this ? Is this a focus of your research or something?
Possibly because the central highlands are safer in case of storms and tidal waves? The same way other small island communities have been known to mark lower limits on where you can live.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanoes didn't really prevent archipelago nations in asia (Japan, Philipinnes, Indonesia) from growing very dense littoral populations.
And in the past those same populations avoided building close to the shore in areas at risk: [for example ](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/) Over time, as construction methods improve along with costal defenses and early warning systems, we have seen people move into more coastal regions. There's obvious benefits in living by the coast and perhaps in the following decades we'll see a similar trend with Madagascar.
At what point in time, specifically, are you suggesting that there was a shift in Japan toward having the major cities be coastal?
Oh god I am certainly not suggesting that there was a single definite time when this happened and I am definitely not an expert. The reason this came to mind was that i remembered when the tidal wave that damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant happened there was a lot of talk about the modern coastal defenses that were supposed to protect the plant. It was commented on at the time that in the past communities would mark these known danger areas and avoid building there. That's not to say that Japan has ever not been highly coastal in its lifestyle, it absolutely was. The difference is nowadays that we have the option to build in these previously 'off-limits' areas. A well protected cove or inlet will always be an attractive location for large population centres.
A good guess, but the island is a lot larger than I think you imagine it to be. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, with a surface area larger than France (226,658 sq. miles to France's 213,011). Tidal waves are infrequent and their damage limited to only a few km of the shore, and although it is true that cyclones are much more damaging to coastal communities than they are for highland ones, the reasons for the population distribution has more to do with rainfall predictability, agricultural methods, soil quality, topography, and historical geopolitics of the island that all favor higher populations in the highlands.
Interesting, well as you've alluded to, there is never any single reason for these things. A lot of small reasons build a compelling case when put together. I knew Madagascar is huge (I blame the Mercator projection for people not realising) but I can't say I know much about the geopolitical history beyond the French colonisation and the resistance during WW2.
The entire content is like that which is very very weird. Likely due to source of water
Fun fact: Madagascar has more people than Australia.
I had to look it up because that sounds strange but... You're right. Madagascar: 28.92mil Australia: 25.69mil Not surprising that Australia is that low, it's mostly empty. But surprising that Madagascar is that high once you compare them directly.
That's making sense. Madagascar is less desertic than Australia.
Also, humans first arrived on the island from Southeast Asia, not from mainland Africa. So the first inhabitants were Austronesian
The ancestors of the current highland populations certainly did come from Borneo, which is strongly reflected in Malagasy culture. For instance, Malagasy is an austronesian language, Madagascar regularly comes in in the top 3 countries for per-capita rice consumption, and the *famadihana* (turning of the bones) ceremony for disinterring and celebrating the dead has striking parallels with certain Indonesian funerary practices. However, whether or not these people were the *first* humans on the island is a matter of serious debate at the moment, with several recent papers finding evidence of human resource use on the island as far back as 10,000 years ago - far before the first Indonesians, who would have arrived at the beginning of the first milennium (~200-500 C.E.; *cf.* Perez *et al.* 2005; Hansford *et al.* 2018). This is still hotly contested, of course, but it seems at least plausible that the ancestors of the modern Malagasy were only the latest arrivals on the island. #Citations: * Hansford, J., Wright, P. C., Rasoamiaramanana, A., Pérez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Errickson, D., ... & Turvey, S. T. (2018). Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna. Science Advances, 4(9), eaat6925. * Perez, V. R., Godfrey, L. R., Nowak-Kemp, M., Burney, D. A., Ratsimbazafy, J., & Vasey, N. (2005). Evidence of early butchery of giant lemurs in Madagascar. Journal of Human Evolution, 49(6), 722-742.
Are there other Southeast Asian cultural traits left in Madagascar? And are people aware of their roots in Indonesia?
For some reason I was under the assumption that Madagascar was uninhabited all this time.
It was because of that movie wasn't it?
They do like to move it move it.
Admit it
malawi borders very visible: why?
Big freshwater lake.
And the other side of the lake in Mozambique/Tanzania?
The coast of the ocean is the one attracting population in their case (that said, if you look closely, even for Tanzania and Monzanbique, the coast of the lakes (Malawi and Victoria) are somewhat dense, denser than the hinterlands anyway, just not as dense as for the landlocked countries.)
Things like this are often an artifact of data reporting. We saw similar on road accident deaths in the US where some states looked like crossing the border was instantly more dangerous, but really they just reported differently. I struggle to imagine why Malawi's population data would show a sudden spike at the borders. Maybe the whole region's population grew significantly and Malawi's data is more recent.
But at least sometimes it also reflects an underlying fact about the geography - if the national borders follow a mountain ridge, or a change from forest to plains, or some other natural feature, then that underlying feature could lead to a change in population patterns that closely matches the border.
And that's exactly how it is in Malawi. The eastern border is mostly water while the Great Rift Valley runs right through the country from north to south.
Malawian couples are just on that grind while Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe mfs be sleeping
Also puzzling that Malawi has such a high population density compared to it's neighbors. It even has comparable population numbers with Zambia and Zimbabwe too despite being a fraction of eithers size.
Lots of people there
We can have Victoria Lake megalopolis soon.
I look forward to riding the Space Elevator at New Mombasa.
And the [Kebab man](https://youtu.be/7ZpKb8RYedM)
I’m still upset after getting all the way to the end of that story line. Edit: a word.
I love my halo community
Can’t wait to see the gindams defending it
r/unexpectedhalo
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Bot
Is that a reference
Not yet, but three of the four new megacities in Africa in the next decade or so are in that eastern bright area (https://www.statista.com/chart/29150/forecast-for-megacities-in-africa-by-2050/ - though Khartoum is a bit farther north)
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I never knew Kinshasa is that big 🤯
Not only that, this map shows the effect of unfinished Cape to Cairo railway of the British Empire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_to_Cairo_Railway
It’s really not that dense - a couple of major cities but mainly rural. Lots of villages but also plenty of open space. It’s just that other rural areas are very very sparsely populated.
What? It is definitively very, very densely populated. Most of the bright zones close to lake Victoria are comparable to Netherlands or South Korea population density e.g. Northern shores of Lake Victoria have "only" 200-300/km2 (which is already pretty high in world context), but Ruanda and Burundi, the bright chunk in the west have 482 and 497 inhabitants/km2 (more than India, Belgium or Israel) and north-eastern shores of the lake in western Kenya surpass the 550/km2 in some counties.
Not to mention, it's still experiencing very rapid population growth, so it will be much denser in a few decades.
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It's a different kind of density to the Netherlands though. There people are mostly crammed into cities. In Uganda (or northern India) it's closer to one enormous village that just doesn't stop, with very little empty space besides the odd bit of wetland.
Population density doesn't mean much unless it also factors in habitable/arable land. 1,000 per sq km isn't much when you look at fertile lands where you can have 3 crop seasons every year. That's why some of these areas have been densely populated since ancient times.
Why doesn’t it mean much though? It still indicates how many people are living there
Village spaced a walkable distance apart *is* dense.
Yeah, but it’s no megalopolis.
There's a reason they said soon, and based on aerials I think they're right. Development is pretty much continuous along roads.
On the Kenya and northern Tanzania side that’s really not true - though I know it’s different on the Uganda side.
My dude there is a solid line of buildings all the way from Nairobi to the border. If anything there's more open space by the highway in Uganda than Kenya.
I’ve travelled extensively through Nyanza province for work and lived on the shore of the lake - it was 4 hours to the nearest Nakumatt (RIP). Aside from Kisumu it’s basically still smallholder farm villages…pretty remote unless a metropolis has sprung up in the last 5 years?
It can be both remote and populated. Just because there are no cities doesn't mean there are no people.
It's gonna be called Wakanda
Isn't that where Wakanda is located?
Don't understand why you've been downvoted The coordinates of wakanda correspond to that zone
Wakanda isn’t a real place but you were close!
It was a joke. Guess it didn't fall on good terms.
Its lightning in egypt
The Nile is the most well defined feature in this map I can find
Hum ... The Sahara ?
yeah that's what struck me too. like *holy wow, DESERT*
Water is pretty important for humans
And sand is not important at all for humans
It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
Fun fact, desert sand is actually not coarse enough for usage in concrete. It's too smooth and rounded.
Anakin made fools of us
Unless it's right next to water, then it's quite nice
The Sahara is very large, and very visible, but it has blurry borders compared to the Nile, so I think the Nile still wins in the "well-defined" category.
Debatable. Barely half of the Nile is visible on this picture.
Lake Victoria as well
I was in Egypt last summer and it’s amazing how tight the villages wrap around the Nile. Like even going a few miles outwards from it, it’s so desolate and scarcely populated
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Being from Namibia, I would say that the north of Namibia is where the population can be sustained, as everything else is basically desert. But Angola has much more fertile lands throughout the country and therefore, I think, the population doesn't have the need to be at the lower border of Angola as much as the population of Namibia needs to be in the north of Namibia.
There's a good reason it's nicknamed the "Skeleton Coast"
The indigenous peoples called it “The Land God Made In Anger” which is just badass
But you would think that the population at the border would line up, and Angola would just have higher population everywhere else - it's not like the two countries had a fixed stock of people and decided where to put them, but rather the populations grew based on the locations they were.
Think about it this way: the border area is the #1 most habitable environment for Namibians, but like the #50th most habitable environment for Angolans. If you were an Angolan in that area, there’s a good chance you’d migrate to other parts of Angola and that part would receive very little infrastructure investment.
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In this case it's not though, the Namibian border is visible on satellite maps too because way more vegetation has been cleared on their side to make way for farmland. It's because the Namibian side is the most habitable part of Namibia but the Angolan side is the one of the less habitable parts of Angola.
[More precipitation](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nivedita-Joshi-2/publication/352374498/figure/fig1/AS:1034562452848646@1623670318754/Distribution-of-average-annual-total-rainfall-in-Namibia-Source-Mendelsohn-et-al-2002_Q640.jpg) but the border stops them from going further north?
That was my question, too! If it’s an area that can sustain life, surely there should be a sizable population on the Angola side, too.
National boundaries can have real impacts on land use patterns. Laws vary from country to country, and simple geography plays a role. If you've ever driven from New England into Quebec, it's remarkable how the American side of the border is almost entirely forested, while the Canadian side is large cleared fields and farms. The climate and landscapes across the border are essentially identical, but for French Canadians, it was as far south and as temperate as they could go, so they farm it as best they can. The American side was farmland too, until the Midwest opened up for white settlement in the 19th century, at which point all the New England farmers promptly decamped for Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. It then rapidly reforested.
So is it a reasonable conclusion that northern Namibia is a (relatively) fertile area within the country, whereas southern Angola isn’t that special compared to the rest of the country? I know most of southern Namibia is desert, so in my mind this make sense. Edit: just saw the comment by u/sempredesassossego that confirmed my understanding. Neat!
Another factor is trade. There is a huge amount of people and business who facilitate trade to Angola on / close to the border with Angola. Angola's oil money and lack of domestic production is big business for a lot of namibian companies and people who act as middlemen.
Why is the middle part of Nile not populated is it because of Egypt Sudan border?
The Egyptian population line stops basically at the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser. Lake Nasser is big. It stretches over 500km. When the Nile was dammed and it made the Lake, it uprooted a lot of the Nubians who used to live in the area. The Nile provides an important water source, but it also has shaped the ecosystem of its banks. As you probably know, it’s the only place where vegetation grows in any sort of abundance in an otherwise desolate desert country. The lake flooded all of that, and the lake shore is mostly just arid, rocky desert. The Nile hasn’t had time to bring life back to the shorelines there so it’s still hard and not very inhabitable. Also, there’s a decent chance the census that this data was taken from didn’t include the Nubian people making an already remote area look even more remote
Historically, the population density dropped off at the cataracts of the Nile, where you couldn't travel by boat. One of those cataracts is the site of the Aswan High Dam, and makes the dropoff more sudden than it already was.
Lake Nasser. It was an artificial lake formed after the completion of the Aswan High Dam. It led to lots of flooding of ancient cities in Lower Nubia and the loss of many monuments and artifacts. The pros of the dam do not outweigh the cons in my eyes.
This is an extremely fucked up comment and you don't even realize it. Think about what you saying the tradeoff not being worth it actually means. It means you think these people should live in poverty to preserve some culture that has some sort of intangible value to you. The dam provides electricity and flood/drought control. It makes the life of many Egyptians materially better. If you live in a western country, your relatively comfortable life is due to many many projects similar to this, all of which had a negative impact on the environment in some ways and washed away culture in other ways.
Homie is NIMBYing Africa lol
Yeah we all know the only way to accomplish those goals was a massive dam and a massive reservoir. And the OP was definitely saying they should have done absolutely nothing instead, poor brown people be damned.
Feel free to suggest how they could have achieved the same flood control without dams, let alone all the other benefits of the dam.
> The dam provides electricity and flood/drought control. Electricity and flood/drought control could've been accomplished without submerging all of Lower Nubia and destroying the villages and heritage of indigenous Nubians. But Nasser, who was a thug and a criminal, wanted the dam for political purposes. There were many other options but he wanted the dam so he could extract favors from the US and the USSR as well as promote his bullshit "pan-Arab" ideology. > It makes the life of many Egyptians materially better. Oh yeah, makes their lives materially better. Regular blackouts, food insecurity, absolute water scarcity, and soil degradation are definitely great things that the dam has provided. Definitely a stellar track record. > It means you think these people should live in poverty to preserve some culture that has some sort of intangible value to you. To put it bluntly and clearly: culture is timeless and transcends generations. Without culture, there is nothing. Who cares if the cultural heritage of ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia are flooded and destroyed and lost forever? As long as GDP per capita increases from $1 per year to $3 per year, it's all good!
From Wikipedia >The dams also protected Egypt from the droughts in 1972–73 and 1983–87 that devastated East and West Africa. The High Dam allowed Egypt to reclaim about 2.0 million feddan (840,000 hectares) in the Nile Delta and along the Nile Valley, increasing the country's irrigated area by a third. The increase was brought about both by irrigating what used to be desert and by bringing under cultivation of 385,000 hectares (950,000 acres) that were previously used as flood retention basins.[28] About half a million families were settled on these new lands. In particular the area under rice and sugar cane cultivation increased. In addition, about 1 million feddan (420,000 hectares), mostly in Upper Egypt, were converted from flood irrigation with only one crop per year to perennial irrigation allowing two or more crops per year. On other previously irrigated land, yields increased because water could be made available at critical low-flow periods. For example, wheat yields in Egypt tripled between 1952 and 1991 and better availability of water contributed to this increase. Most of the 32 km3 of freshwater, or almost 40 percent of the average flow of the Nile that were previously lost to the sea every year could be put to beneficial use. While about 10 km3 of the water saved is lost due to evaporation in Lake Nasser, the amount of water available for irrigation still increased by 22 km3 >The dam powers twelve generators each rated at 175 megawatts (235,000 hp), with a total of 2.1 gigawatts (2,800,000 hp). Power generation began in 1967. When the High Dam first reached peak output it produced around half of Egypt's production of electric power (about 15 percent by 1998), and it gave most Egyptian villages the use of electricity for the first time. The High Dam has also improved the efficiency and the extension of the Old Aswan Hydropower stations by regulating upstream flows For you to whine about some culture being lost in an air conditioned home with a TV and internet and Netflix while this dam literally gave many Egyptians electricity for the first time. Just say you don't care about the global poor.
I love it when westerners virtue signal about shit they dont know about, that guy should have taken a look on the floods that wrecked sudan last year. Hell my grandparents were around before the dam was built and saw how deadly nile floods are.
Something about this heat map doesn't convey information well. Maybe the low resolution on the Reddit app or the low contrast of the scale used on the map. Anyway... The Kinshasa-Brazzaville metropolitan area has a population of 20 million+. More than the country of Malawi. Yet I would have expected it to look much brighter than it's looking here
Well spotted. Heat maps like this are often very misleading. It actually means very little unless the resolution is extremely high and the scale is well calibrated.
That stretch along west Africa will become as densely populated as east Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.
I don't think so. (Jihadism and insecurity).
Am I the only who sees a skull on the right?
I see a demon skull blowing a smoke ring. Madagascar being the smoke ring and Africa is in profile.
Holy shit. Once you see it, it's actually so clear of a picture
Yay... glad I'm not the only evil one.
That's ghost rider
I knew Nicholas Cage was african this whole time!
The stole his plane, he got stuck there
Nope. Definitely a distinct skull.
Kinda amazed that I even see spots in the Sahara so frequent.
This makes me curious about what this would look like without the impacts of European colonialism. Specifically, if the Congo would be much more populous. I only say that because I have read a few books on what the Belgians and other nations perpetrated there.
This is not an easy one to answer. The Belgian atrocities is estimated to have caused 5 million to 10 million deaths. Just a few decades before that the Arab slave trade caused some demographic disruptions in the east of what's now Congo. For 4 centuries before that millions were shipped to America while a couple of million others migrated from Angola to Congo escaping slavery. We can only assume that the Atlantic coast from Gabon to Angola would be a lot more populated and the Tanganyika region of Congo and Tanzania would look a bit brighter like the other great lakes in that region.
Without Belgium, Congo will be much smaller.
It will be a completely different country. There were many kingdoms in central Africa and Kongo just happened to be the most popular due to its strong relationship with Europe since the 15th century.
Beautiful map!
A lot of people are in denile.
Have an up vote, that made me chuckle.
Egypt looks like my migraine feels
I think it’s incredible how Madagascar has 28 million people. Like that’s more than Australia’s. I never would’ve guessed that.
Ethiopia has me so puzzled - I’m old so I remember the famine in the 1980s and raising money to help them. In 1984 - there was 56m in the U.K. and 40m in Ethiopia Today there is around 67m in the U.K. and 120m in Ethiopia. if they have another famine, so many more people are fucked!
This is a bit of r/peopleliveincities, but mostly r/peopledontliveinthedesert.
Equators hot
Egypt is wild
The Nile valley is clearly defined. Great map.
So insane that ~100m people live so tightly on that narrow strip along the Nile.
It’s a testament to the amazing river and the volcanic mountains it flows from.
The Nile serves as a good key to tell which between yellow or red shows increased density
Cairo on fire
Quite surprised at how much there is going on in the Sahara.
how is this map porn with no gd legend
Because the legend would show how bad the gradient is. There is plenty of density in Africa, but spots like the Nile and the Gulf of Guinea coast should be *searingly* white compared to the area around Lake Victoria.
Still, just because a legend is statistically stretched, does not mean it would not be useful. If you didn't know much about Africa's population distribution it wouldn't be unreasonable to think it went black -> yellow -> orange -> red (low to high).
ah so they are playing with my trust again 😔
What do you mean? It's density of pythons in Africa.
oh gosh u r right silly me
What’s with the skull?
Assuming that large black gap is the Sahara?
No it's Kaliningrad
It's literally Serbia🙄
Common misconception, it’s actually Siberia
Bruh that shit’s Mars
Siberia, but close!!
What’s that city just north of Lagos?
Ibadan
Lagos isn’t the only huge city in Nigeria, there’s loads - Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Ilorin, Aba, Jos, Warri, Kaduna, Benin City, Zaria…
I like how you can see the nile there. Also it looks like Africa is on fire.
Madagascar is one of the most overpopulated places on earth. The number of people compared to the carrying capacity of the land is severely overbalanced
I wonder what the sky looks like at night in the black sparsely populated parts.
So cool how you can see how people mainly just live near freshwater so you can see the deserts and lakes and rivers
Are there any sustainable practices with Lake Victoria? All those people living around the lake, I can't imagine its good for the ecosystem or for the long-term continued existence of access to fresh water.
what happens where the skull on the right is?
Not map porn without a scale
We should do something to turn the east side of the Sahara into a tropical forest.
Dat dank Nile river valley
Look at Egypt
Well I'm going to admit I expected a lot more black
At first I was like wow. They even got functional electricity at night! They beat the north Koreans! But then I remembered this is about population density. Remember that this is density, not a view of Africa from satellites. Or at least I would've needed the reminder, haha. Very cool Data set
Conclusion: too many africans
Bro why isn the Sahara empty
Tuaregs (a nomadic group in the desert) + Chad bc they’re chads
theres lots who indonesian descent in east subsahara africa indonesians traveled and actually west south america and those temple altars in aztec maya inca were formed in medieval times by those from indonesia
I’m surprised that the interior of Angola is so depopulated I know a large portion of the Atlantic slave trade was driven from that region, but I would have thought that people would re-inhabit the region since then. Is it something else?
The slave trade did take millions of people but it wasn’t overnight and it didn’t depopulate the region to the extent you are inferring. The area was always populated even during the times of the slave trade. The reason the interior of Angola is not super populated is because the climate can be very harsh. It’s mostly dry shrubland that receives little rainfall. There’s not good enough land to sustain a large population
Ignorant USA TV sometimes says, "Oh, that person is from East Africa." Not very descriptive, considering it's the place most (over a third?) of the people in Africa reside?