These developments in the biological sciences are o f little interest to our colleagues in other research areas for whom the Aryan presence remains a… - Kenneth A. R. Kennedy

[Kennedy also notes the anthropological continuity between the Harappan population and that of the contemporaneous Gandhara (eastern Afghanistan)101 culture, which in an Aryan invasion scenario should be the Indo-Aryan settlement just prior to the Aryan invasion of India:] “Our multivariate approach does not define the biological identity of an ancient Aryan population, but it does indicate that the Indus Valley and Gandhara peoples shared a number of craniometric, odontometric and discrete traits that point to a high degree of biological affinity.”

A recent study by Hemphill, Lukacs and Kennedy (1991) supports the thesis that ancient Gandhärans and Harappans share significant similarities in craniometric, odontometric and discrete trait variables.

K. Kennedy (1984), however, who was able to examine all three hundred skeletons that had been retrieved from the Indus Valley Civilization, found that the ancient Harappans "are not markedly different in their skeletal biology from the present-day inhabitants of Northwestern India and Pakistan" (102). He considers any physical variations in the skeletal record to be perfectly normal for a metropolitan setting and consistent with any urban population past or present (103). As far as he is concerned, the polytypism in the South Asian record represents an "overlap of relatively homogeneous tribal and outcaste groups and their penetration into villages, then into urban environments of more heterogeneous people." There is no need to defer to intruding aliens for any of this: "This dynamic rather than mass migration and invasions of nomadic and warlike peoples better accounts for the biological constitutions of those earlier urban populations in the Indus valley." Here, again, we encounter the same objections raised repeatedly by South Asian archaeologists: "Of the Aryans, we must defer to literary and linguistic scholars in whose province lies the determination of the arrival and nature of the linguistic phenomenon we call the Aryans. . . . But archaeological evidence of Aryan- speaking peoples is questionable and the skeletal evidence is nil" (104).