Source: TW
This seems to be the massive book form treatment of Zoller’s hypothesis. While I have not read the book, I have read his paper on the same.
Entirely independently, based on some obvious linguistic signals & multiple lines of philological evidence, I have always favored the idea of the Aryan invasion in multiple waves along with the initial straddling of the steppe and the subcontinental zones.
He provides a new version of the Inner-Outer IA hypothesis. Essentially he posits that only the inner lects are descendants of Vedic & subsequent Sanskrit while the the outer lects are descendants of distinct para-Vedic lects that had some archaisms inherited from IE>I-Ir that did not come into Vedic & its daughters.
Where we differ from his ideas in that the progenitors of outer lects had arrived in the subcontinent before Vedic – they were the first wave of Aryans.+++(5)+++
Secondly, he also thinks this older wave was the one that encountered a Munda-like Austrasiatic language. This is of course patently wrong for Munda or any other Austro-Asiatic was nowhere in the picture. Instead, we have to turn to the Harappan language which almost certainly was not Dravidian in the main. Second, we also have to consider pre-Aryan exchanges between the dominant Indus language & other non-Aryan “HG” (~“AASI”) languages, which then filtered through to Indo-Aryan.
He probably has the temporal pattern of the invasions inverted. The distinctions might instead be related to the dominance of pUru successors, the kuru & pa~nchAla in vedic productivity (inherited from their pUru predecessors on the steppe) after the invasion of India & a later invasion dominated by a group recorded in the national epic as the pANDu-s.
The direct IA hunter-gatherer admixture seen in several V1 groups with a lower Harappan content (i.e., heterogeneity inside “ANI”) is suggestive of them not tarrying in the Harappan zone for long before penetrating into the Doab.
The later group did tarry in gandhAra & the ex-Harappan zone for probably a good 4-6 centuries before following suit into the Doab.
Zoller says that his use of Austro-Asiatic or Munda is a “kludge”. Thus, even though he says that he goes beyond duShTa vatsalAchArya it is essentially not far from his “para-Munda.” Genomics strongly argues against an old AA substrate, especially in the Northwest.