Moreover, available chronologies indicate that Mehrgarh was contemporary with comparable Southwest Asian phenomena which, combined with the abs­ence … - Jim G. Shaffer

Despite the early misgivings of some scholars about such a correlation between language and race and the circular nature of many of the arguments, the concept of a common linguistic, cultural, biological, and historical heritage linking European and Indian peoples became internationally accepted as more fact than theory. Based on linguistic reconstructions, the prehistoric to historic chronologies of Europe and India were interpreted as reflecting various invasions of Indo-European or Indo-Aryan peoples who possessed a common cultural heritage, albeit remote. For Europe, this concept ultimately resulted in the disaster of the Third Reich, whereas in South Asia, the concept of Indo-Aryan peoples played a quite different cultural role.

Academic discourse in philology, ethnology, archaeology, paleontology, biology, and religion was plumbed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to substantiate a sense of self and shared identity in a newly expanded view of the known geographic world and in a reassessment of a chronology of human antiquity beyond a Biblical interpretation of human origins.

It is singularly refreshing, against this dogmatic pursuit of what may be an unobtainable goal, to know there are South Asian scholars who “. . . do not believe that the available data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people”