The origin of Malagasy DNA is half African and half Indonesian, nevertheless the Malagasy language, spoken by the entire population, belongs to the Austronesian family. The language most closely related to Malagasy is Maanyan (Greater Barito East gro
up of the Austronesian family), but related languages are also in Sulawesi, Malaysia and Sumatra. For this reason, and because Maanyan is spoken by a population which lives along the Barito river in Kalimantan and which does not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, the ethnic composition of the Indonesian colonizers is still unclear. There is a general consensus that Indonesian sailors reached Madagascar by a maritime trek, but the time, the path and the landing area of the first colonization are all disputed. In this research we try to answer these problems together with other ones, such as the historical configuration of Malagasy dialects, by types of analysis related to lexicostatistics and glottochronology which draw upon the automated method recently proposed by the authors cite{Serva:2008, Holman:2008, Petroni:2008, Bakker:2009}. The data were collected by the first author at the beginning of 2010 with the invaluable help of Joselin`a Soafara Nere and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23 dialects covering all areas of the Island.
Religious adherence can be considered as a degree of freedom, in a statistical physics sense, for a human agent belonging to a population. The distribution, performance and life time of religions can thus be studied having in mind heterogeneous inter
acting agent modeling in mind. We present a comprehensive analysis of 58 so called religion (to be better defined in the main text) evolutions, as measured through their number of adherents between 1900 and 2000, - data taken from the World Christian Encyclopedia: 40 are considered to be presently growing cases, including 11 turn overs in the XX century; 18 are presently decaying, among which 12 are found to have had a recent maximum, in the XIX or the XX century. The Avrami-Kolmogorov differential equation which usually describes solid state transformations, like crystal growth, is used in each case in order to obtain the preferential attachment parameter introduced previously. It is often found close to unity, indicating a smooth evolution. However large values suggest the occurrence of extreme cases which we conjecture are controlled by so called external fields. A few cases indicate the likeliness of a detachment process. We discuss different growing and decaying religions, and illustrate various fits. Some cases seem to indicate the lack of reliability of the data. Others, departure from Avrami law. We point out two difficulties in the analysis : (i) the precise original time of apparition of a religion, (ii) the time of its maximum, both informations being necessary for integrating reliably any evolution equation. Moreover the Avrami evolution equation might be surely improved, in particular, and somewhat obviously, for the decaying religion cases.
