This is more than halfway around the world, making Austronesian the most widely dispersed language family on Earth before the sixteenth century. https://twitter.com/koutchoukalimar/status/1326125399357726727

It's important to note that these movements of people and/or languages did not all happen at the same time. Madagascar was settled by Austronesian speakers (mid-1st-millennium CE) well over a millennium after Tonga (c.900 BCE).

The people who settled Madagascar were not fundamentally "the same" as the people who settled Tonga. Totally different language and culture, really.

It's best not to think of "Austronesians" as a people/ethnos because they weren't and wouldn't have thought of themselves as such (probably at any point in history or prehistory before now).

This is becoming a popular thing in Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. - to identify oneself as "Austronesian", not just in the sense of speaking an Austronesian language but also in a racial or ethnic sense. This is an entirely modern creation.

So, well, you look at a map like that and think "wow, what an achievement" - but we're talking about a process that took millennia and principally involved the dispersal of *language* (not necessarily the same as the movement of people).