The term 'Early Harappan' as opposed to 'Pre-Harappan' has gained acceptance for a number of reasons. The principal reason is the evidence for cultur… - Gregory Possehl

Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited os a useful concept in human biology…. There is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.

Over the course of the third and second millennia, the Sarasvati dried up.

Of relevance here is Possehl's observation (1977) of the "extraordinary 'empty spaces' between the Harappan settlement clusters," as well as "the isolated context for a number of individual sites" (546). He proposes that "pastoral nomads, or other highly mobile (itinerant) occupational specialists filled in the interstices," since such spaces are un- likely to have been unoccupied. He goes so far as to suggest that "pastoralists formed the bulk of the population during Harappan times since there do not seem to be any settled village farming communities there" (547). Pastoralists and farmers coexisted "not . . . as isolated from one another, but as complementary subsystems: two aspects of an integrated whole. One relied on the intensive exploitation of plants and arable land, the other on the extensive exploitation of animals and pastures" (547). Moreover, "the presence of pastoralists makes very good sense if we see them as the mobile population which bridged the gap between settlements as the carriers of information, as the transporters of goods, as the population through which the Harappan Civilization achieved its remark- able degree of integration" (548).