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- We should encounter obvious discontinuities in the prehistoric skeletal record that correspond with a period around 1500 B.C., the proposed time for the disruptive demographic event.... there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the North‐Western sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture..... Discontinuities are indicated in our skeletal data for early Neolithic populations in Baluchistan and for early Iron Age populations in the Northwest Frontier region, events too early and too late, respectively, to fit into the classic scenario of a mid-second millennium B.C. Aryan invasion...... At best, the skeletal biologist familiar with the record of human remains from South Asia can respond by asking "How could one recognize an Aryan, living or dead, when the biological criteria for Aryanness are non-existent?" (Kennedy 1995)
- If Vedic Aryans were a biological entity represented by the skeletons from Timargarha, then their biological features of cranial and dental anatomy were not distinct to a marked degree from what we encountered in the ancient Harappans..... 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 affnity. (Kennedy 1995)
- There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 B.C. and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 B.C. (Kenoyer 1998: 174)
- So far archaeology and palaeontlogy, based on multi-variate analysis of skeletal features, have not found a new wave of immigration into the subcontinent after 4500 BCE (a separation between the Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations of Mehrgarh), and up to 800 BCE: ''Aryan bones'' have not been discovered, not even of the Gandhåra Grave culture which is usually believed to have been IA… J. Lukacs asserts unequivocally that no significant population changes took place in the centuries prior to 800 BC. (Witzel 2002)
- This [Aryan invasion] theory of Indian civilization is perhaps one of the most perduring and insidious themes in the historiography and archaeology of South Asia, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary (Johansen 2003. 195)
- There is absolutely NO archaeological evidence for any variant of the Andronovo culture either reaching or infuencing the cultures of Iran or northern India in the second millennium. Not a single artifact of identifiable Andronovo type has been recovered from the Iranian Plateau, northern India, or Pakistan. (Lamberg-Karlovsky,2004)
- The archaeological evidence for an expansion from the steppelands across historical Iran and India varies from the extremely meagre to total absence: both the Anatolian and the Kurgan theory find it extraordinarily diffcult to explain the expansion of the Indo-European languages over a vast area of urbanized Asian populations, approximately the same area as that of Europe. (Mallory and Adams 2006)
- No support for the entry of ‘Aryan’ populations [in India] is found in physical anthropological data (Petraglia & Allchin 2007)
- Over the course of the past half century, the model of an Indo-Aryan population invasion have been thoroughly problematized, and largely discredited within archaeology.. What the accumulation of archaeological evidence over the course of the twentieth century has inevitably demonstrated is that the major transitions in South Asian pre- and proto-history are gradual and often show little evidence for any outside origin… Archaeologists in particular have thus very much moved away from migrationist models, including the idea of Indo-Aryan invasions, as an explanation for cultural change in South Asia. (Boivin 2007)
- The hypotheses regarding massive population movements during the protohistoric period cannot be supported on available skeletal data. (Walimbe 2007)
- The incursions of ‘foreign’ people within the periods of time associated with the Harappan decline cannot be documented by the skeletal record … The physical anthropological data refutes the hypothesis of ‘Aryan invasion' (Walimbe 2014)
- The archaeological record of Harappan decline in the Indus Valley itself has never revealed any obvious connection with the widely claimed origin for these Indo-European invaders in the Pontic steppes or central Asia. In my view, supported linguistically.. the Harappan decline had nothing whatsoever to do with any Indo-European arrival in Pakistan or India, since this language family had already been present there for several millennia beforehand. (Bellwood 2014, 156)
- There is no evidence for an invasion or mass migration of new peoples from outside which destroyed the networks of the Integration Era. Instead, there is evidence in the form of both artefacts and structures which demonstrates that there was a degree of continuity, although the form, scale and patterns of human communities and their settlements altered; or as many researchers describe it, there was a distinct transformation…… Indeed, Sankalia’s statement of 1962 still remains valid, that despite almost a century of investigations, “we have not found anything “Aryan” on the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilisation” (Coningham and Young 2015)
- ..the completely discredited idea that there had been an Aryan invasion in the first half of the second millennium BCE. There is absolutely no archaeological or skeletal evidence of such a large-scale conflagration.. (Robbins Schug, Parnell, and Harrod 2020)
- We may admit that some steppe groups penetrated to the south, but there is no archaeological evidence of this migration, and the whole cultural genesis in both Iran and India was connected with the west. (Grigoriev 2021)
- At least one thing is sure: the collapse of both these urban civilizations (i.e., those of the BMAC and the Indus) was not caused by attacks by Andronovan barbarians from the steppes. There are no traces of Andronovan objects south of the BMAC, and the same is true in the Hindu Kush mountain passes that lead to India. As we have seen, there are no traces either in the Indus Valley. But since the current languages spoken in Northern India indeed belong to the Indo-European group, there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations. (Demoule 2023)
- It has long remained a recognized weakness of the Steppe hypothesis that the archaeological record lacks any obvious impacts out of the Steppe in a time-frame early enough to fit well with the scale of linguistic divergence within Indo-Iranic. Advocates of the Steppe hypothesis have widely assumed that the Andronovo culture ‘must have’ been Indo-Iranic-speaking, but even Mallory “find
it extraordinarily diffcult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India”, and more generally finds no obvious connection to “the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans”. (Heggarty et al. 2023)
