According to Kuzmina, the fact that the essential equipment of the Indo-Aryan charioteers in the Mitanni kingdom and in India has no prototypes or an… - Elena Efimovna Kuzmina

Kuzmina (1983), at least, has taken this advice seriously. As far as she is concerned, "all . . . evidence as to the character of the pottery produced in Asia Minor and Central Asia in the third and second millennium B.C. categorically rules out searching for the proto-home of the Vedic Aryans throughout [this] entire stretch" (23). According to her, then, the southern route is ruled out.

In contrast, she holds that on many essential points Andronovo pottery techniques are absolutely similar to those practiced by the Vedic Aryans (as reconstructed by Rau): "Ceramic finds trace the gradual infiltration of the farming oases of Marghiana and Bactria by the late-Andronovo tribes and their emergence on the mountain passes leading into the Indian subcontinent, which may provide the clue to the problem of the origin of the Aryans" (24-27). Kuzmina is forced to concede, however, that "in the Andronovo culture it was mainly the womenfolk who engaged in the making of pottery. ... in the case of the Vedic Aryans it was the male paterfamilias." Moreover, "The second major distinction is the richness of the impressed decoration of the Andronovo pottery, whose geometrical designs include triangle, meander, swastika, lozenge and herringbone" (26). Vedic pottery is supposed to be plain. Neither southern nor northern routes, then, have fully fulfilled Rau's Vedic pottery criteria.

“Federovo monuments are discovered not only in the Urals but also in the south of Central Asia and Afghanistan, where Ugrians have never lived.” (p.201) Moreover, elsewhere she designates central Kazakhstan as the Fedorovo heartland: “The further one moves from central Kazakhstan, the frequency of the complex diminishes and substratum elements increase”. (p.24)