The concept of an Indo-European or Indo-Aryan group of peoples has played a prominent role in interpretative studies of Old World history and archaeo… - Jim G. Shaffer

These factors suggest, given the increasingly arid savanna ecology of the Grea­ter Indus Valley after ca. 4000 B.C., that this continued preference for cattle was a deliberate cultural decision by the social groups in the area, and that cattle were objects of important cultural wealth.

Linguistic reconstructions have a reputation of scientific validity based on the study of existing languages (written and non-written). However, linguistic reconstructions based upon supposed rates of linguistic change are the archaeological equivalents of estimating absolute chronology from the depth of deposits. There are simply too many intervening cultural and historical variables to permit any great degree of cross-cultural accuracy. In archaeology, such methods were replaced when better aids to cultural identification, such as radiocarbon dating, became available. Linguistic reconstructions for the area are no longer independently supported by the archaeological data, and even if one is reluctant to disregard these reconstructions completely, the present data nonetheless suggest critical reevaluation of earlier interpretations.

The existing interpretative discussions postulating large-scale human “invasions” simply do not correlate with the physical, archaeological, or paleoanthropological, data.