While a good case can be made for an expansion of Pontic-Caspian pastoralists onto the Asiatic steppe, and perhaps also into the belt of central Asia… - James Patrick Mallory

In his earlier works, Mallory himself, acknowledged that theories pertaining to an Asian homeland had long fallen out of repute, "but one wonders if this is not just partly due to the ridicule heaped upon them by their opponents rather than reasoned dismissal" ... "all too often has one discredited line of argument been used to ridicule another theory which came to the same conclusion" (Mallory 1975, 56).

"as the IE homeland problem involves a spatial definition of a prehistoric linguistic construct, the utility of any other discipline, such as archaeology, depends on whether a linguistic entity can be translated into something discernable in the archaeological record. In short, any solution not purely linguistic must involve some form of indirect inference whose own premises are usually, if not invariably, far from demonstrated" (Mallory 1997, 94).

It is not easy to make a simple appeal to the Andronovo culture to resolve all the issues of Indo-Iranian origins... When the archaeological evidence becomes so opaque then our only refuge... is probability and a little intuition.