The world has saluted Sir David Attenborough on his 100th birthday. He doesn’t sit in an armchair, but continues to work on television documentaries that bring the natural world into our living rooms. In my lectures on human origins, I always insert clips taken from his programmes, particularly when it concerns the origins of human behaviour as seen in the lives of our close cousins. On one occasion he brought home to us the grisly details of chimpanzees co-operatively hunting a monkey, and sharing the meat. Here, he said, we see the origins of our own co-operative behaviour. On another programme he illustrated how they make and use tools. Another programme referenced Madagascar, of great interest to us because of its many fascinating parallels with the settlement of Aotearoa. Archaeological research has traced the origins of the first permanent human settlement of Madagascar to about 400AD, with the likelihood that it was a few centuries earlier.…