Key evidence
- “The master key for discerning historical expansions and migrations is the internal chronology of the Rg-Veda. Basing himself on two centuries of Western scholarship, from 19th-century German Veda scholar Oldenburg to present-day AIT champion Prof. Michael Witzel, Talageri compares the contents of the oldest layer, largely coinciding with books 6, 3 and 7; of the middle layer, books 2 and 4; and the youngest layer, comprising books 1, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Covering every verse and every instance of every category considered, and comparing the three periods, he finds a shifting focus in the names of animals, plants, rivers, landscape features, technology, ancestors, ethnic groups, and in personal name types and verse forms. " [KE15, KE_L15]
- “Another emigrant group is the one whose settlement has been dug up in Sintashta, on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains in Russia. This is where the oldest horse-drawn chariots have been found, dated to ca. 2000 BC. The burials show a number of ritual features which Witzel has connected to the Rigveda in a bid to buttress his thesis that the Sintashta people were proto-Indo-Aryans on the way to India. But of each of these features, including the fabled horse sacrifice, Talageri shows that they are typical of the late period of the Rigveda, unattested in the older periods. "
- Absence of non-IE place-names (which are usually heavily conserved) in north India
- (Can in part be explained by the vyutpatti power of sanskrit.)
Cattle
- “one of the slam dunks that some indians do re: intrusive aryans is that the cattle are clearly bos taurus not indicus. But that’s not surprising, the latter are really well adapted to tropical climes. also, the steppe ppl brought their dogs to Europe but they died off.” - rAzib
Problems
Genetic
- “They show that the massive expansion of R1a happened in India coevally with that of R1b in Europe and both the Indian and the European R1 haplogroups occur together only in the ancient steppe DNA recovered by Reich in the time range of 5,500-4,000 YBP. The timeline of R1a expansion in India has now been accurately determined to no earlier than 4,500 YBP. … Therefore, unless new genetic evidence surfaces which testifies to the simultaneous occurrence of R1a and R1b in India in the time range of 5,500-4,000 YBP, OIT cannot be resurrected.” [KV16N16 H17]
- " But the idea that most of the ancestry of South Asians dates to the last Ice Age, that is, the Indo-Aryan invasion was demographically marginal, was a defensible position until recently. For example, in 2006 you have a paper such as Polarity and Temporality of High-Resolution Y-Chromosome Distributions in India Identify Both Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists. Additionally, as individuals have pointed out to me ad nauseam, archaeologists are skeptical of mass migration because of lack of remains. First, a paper from 2006 is wildly out of date for this field. The methods used have been superseded. Instead of using one locus, the Y chromosome, and focusing on microsatellites (which have upsides and downsides), researchers now look at the whole genome.” [RK16]
Linguistic
- “In The Indo-Iranian Substratum, Alexander Lubatsky points out that the oldest borrowings into Finno-Ugric (FU) are from IA and not IIr. The speakers of FU didn’t live in the vicinity of India. Their contacts with the IE speakers happened further to the West. If OIT were correct then one must expect IIr speakers to have constituted the vanguard in the westward out flux from India and transmitted loan words into FU. It would’ve resulted in the attestation of IIr loans in the oldest strata of FU. However, that is not the case. The loan words in the oldest strata are from IA which suggests that they were directly transmitted from IA to FU.” [KV16]