"The linguistic indications are a weak type of evidence, but happen to be in consonance with the more impressive literary evidence from the Vedic and Avestan corpus gathered by Shrikant Talageri. This, then, will remain his major claim to fame: the surprising discovery that literary evidence reaches back far enough to provide information on the disintegration of undivided PIE.... A closer analysis of verse forms and name types proved that the Avestan and (the Sanskrit-speaking founders of) the Mitannic cultures are clearly of a piece with the youngest layer of the Rg-Veda. This in turn allowed for absolute chronological information: the Rg-Veda is centuries older than the Mitanni kingdom of the mid-2nd millennium, mainly a work from the -3rd millennium. This again is completely at variance with an AIT that has the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans enter India only in the -2nd millennium.... Thus, conventional scholars say that the Rg-Veda mentions the chariot, and so they link its date to the archaeological finds of chariots (in the past, this meant they could maintain that the Aryan invaders had brought the chariots in ca. -1500, though now the recent finding of the Sanauli chariot dated ca. -2000 would already create difficulties for the AIT). But Talageri shows that only the final layer mentions chariots, whereas the earlier layers only mention carts. Not that carts are unimportant: in my own opinion, they are a large part of the secret to the IE-speaking migrants’ spectacular expansion: this typically IE invention, with terms for six of its parts attested in all branches of IE, allowed for fast and distant migrations not of bands of young men who would end up marrying local women and losing their distinctive languages, but of entire families who would fairly faithfully reproduce their language in the Kavaṣa next generations. At any rate, the specific innovation of a new, lighter and faster type of cart that became the chariot could well be dated to no earlier than the late 3rd millennium and thus pin the last book of the Rg-Veda down to that period, yet leave the other books free to be dated centuries earlier.... In linguistics, it has been argued by Vaclav Blažek that Indo-Iranian imparted hundreds of words to the Uralic languages, alright, but that at least one word went the other way, viz. a word for “moon phase” or “lunar eclipse”, attested in even the most distant of the Uralic languages, that corresponds to the Vedic name Gungu, indicating (the goddess of) the first lunar crescent after the New Moon. This would prove that the Vedic people had had a history of staying in the Uralic region before migrating to India. Talageri checks the layers of the Veda and finds that Gungu appears only in a later part of the Rg-Veda, as well as in the subsequent Atharva Veda, but not in the early parts of the Rg-Veda. Yet, had the Vedic seers brought the name or concept of Gungu from their pre-invasion habitat, you would have expected to see it in the oldest parts."