In this way it might be argued that, from the very earliest farming times, as represented by Mehrgarh and by other sites later, an early; lndo-Europe… - Colin Renfrew

This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium ec has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages of Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early Neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley Civilization~ point that Jarrige has recently stressed. Moreover the continuity is seen to follow unbroken from that time across the Dark Age succeeding the collapse of the urban centres of the Indus Valley, so that features of that urban civilization persist, across a series of transformations, to form the basis for later Indian civilization. A number of scholars have previously developed these ideas of continuity.

Despite Wheeler's comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization, which on this hypothesis would be speaking the Indo-European ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit. Certainly there are elements of continuity from the Indus Civilization onto its aftermath. The main disruption was the ending of urban life, but as Raymond Allchin has emphasized, the rural life of northern India, and what is now Pakistan, carried on little changed.

The significance of the horse for the understanding of the distribution of early Indo-European has been much exaggerated.