Does it matter that Madagascar is an island?

Being an island has been important for Madagascar's archaeology in two ways. First, its insularity was probably responsible for the lateness and some features of its first human colonizers, as well as for its highly endemic flora and fauna. The earliest coastal communities continued to interact with the Indian Ocean trade network, but the latterly settled inferior eventually saw the greatest population increases, eclipsing the coastal communities in power. Second, it may be that as an island, archaeologists have unconsciously been predisposed to interpret Malagasy prehistory in terms of a tree-like model of evolution from a single ancestral culture. Yet if as seems probable, Malagasy culture has seen contributions from many others, such a single ''proto-culture'' may never have existed.