I knew only two things about this big island.
On this island you find lemurs (primitive monkeys?).
The eastern half of the island is inhabited by people who speak a Polynesian language(s).
The ancestors of these people navigated across the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia, like what is today Malaysia, Indonesia, or maybe the Philippines thousands of years ago.
These Polynesian people(s) also sailed northeast to Taiwan, prehistoric Japan, Hawaii, southeast to New Zealand, and most incredibly to the Easter Island, famous for the giant stone statues known as Moai.
I don’t have a globe here with me, but I think their trajectory starting from the Easter Island (So named because the Dutch navigators “discovered” it in April, around the Easter time) to Madagascar, it will be about 3/4 of the earth’s surface.
This makes Polynesian the most widespread language before Columbus. But this is a cheeky claim. LOL