The balance of the evidence, as recently usefully reviewed by Shaffer, is in favour of the presence of an Indo-European speaking population during th… - 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.

This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in 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.

In the Indo-European field, linguists have been willing to follow the archaeological orthodoxy of nearly a century ago, while archaeologists have taken the conclusions of the historical linguists at their face value, failing to realize that they were themselves based upon archaeological assumptions which had not been questioned, yet which were not, in some cases, justifiable.