This suggests that the changes and discontinuities reflect a transformation of the local population rather than the appearance of new people and the … - Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

The Vedic peoples discriminated against the Dasa, a group of people who spoke a different language that did not sound at all like Sanskrit. The Brahmins sometimes made fun of the Dasa and said that they spoke as if they had no noses. (Pinch your nose and see what you would sound like.) The Dasa had wide flat noses and long curly black hair, and the Brahmins claimed that they had darker skin and called them uncivilized barbarians, who didn’t know how to behave…. The Dasa had, in reality lived in the region for hundreds of years. Their ancestors in the Indus Valley were the Harappans who had named the rivers and mountains, and had built the cities that now lay abandoned.

Episodes of aggression and conflict probably occurred, but armed conflict was not a major activity, nor does the integration of the Indus Valley seem to have been achieved through military coercion.

There is evidence for the intensification of subsistence practice, multicropping and the adoption of new forms of transportation (camel and horse). These changes were made by the indigenous inhabitants, and were not the result of new people streaming into the re- gion. The horse and camel would indicate connections with Central Asia. The cultiva- tion of rice would connect with cither the Late Harappan in the Ganga-Yamuna region or Gujarat. (Kenoyer 1995, 227;)