The discovery of extensive nonceramic occupations associated with early domesticates at Mehrgarh, dated to pre-6000 B.C. (Jarrige and Meadow, 1980). … - Jim G. Shaffer

The Mehrgarh excavations near Sibri, Pakistan, changed our understanding of the origins of food production - the use of domesticated plants and animals in a neolithic context - in South Asia. Previously, food production and the entire “village way o f life” were perceived as a single complex, diffused from the W est sometime after 5000 B.C. They, in turn, were followed by the “idea” of civilisation only a few millennia later, then by the Aryan, Greek, Muslim and British invasions. The acceptance of one incidence of cultural diffusion/invasion made the others seem that much more reasonable.

In both instances, the Indo-Aryan concept was never subjected to rigorous validation beyond the field of historical linguistics. Linguistic reconstructions were used to interpret archaeological materials, which in tum were used to substantiate the original cultural reconstructions. It was not until the mid-20th century that archaeological data were independently used to examine the validity of the Indo-Aryan concept.

The existing interpretative discussions postulating large-scale human “invasions” simply do not correlate with the physical, archaeological, or paleoanthropological, data.