M. Witzel attacked several scholars who since the early 1990s manifested support for the Indian Indigenous Origin (IIO hereafter); amid various criti… - Nikos Kazanas

From a very long experience of reading, studying and teaching, of participating in Conferences and, in recent years, of editing articles for Journals (and, of course, private contacts and exchanges with scholars in many fields) I acquired the certainty that very few academics use their reason to the full and even fewer are, despite their vociferous protestations to the contrary, interested in truth.

The Aryans, even according to the AIT, moved not into a vacuum but a region thickly populated by a people who may have been on the decline and moving eastward but who were also more numerous, more advanced in urbanized civilization and literate. Now, would the immigrants be in a position to give new names and would the natives accept them for their rivers? … I doubt it. When thousands of Greeks were forced out of Turkey in the early 1920s and immigrated into the Greek islands and the mainland, they formed new communities and often gave to these the names of their former habitats (eg New Ionia, New Smyrna, New Halkidona etc). This is as far as their “nostalgia” went. They did not rechristen nearby mountains, plains or rivers, but accepted the existing geographical nomenclature.

Neither the AIT, nor the invasionists’ or non-invasionists’ views, nor IE reconstructions, nor philological, archeological etc pursuits, hold much interest for me. What essentially concerns me is the subject of Ethics (in Scholarship and daily life) because this will determine how we meet death. Everything else in the world can be avoided, hoodwinked etc, but not death. Ethics also infuses communal life with the quality of excellence.