"The reason for this unpleasant pattern of falsely attributing silly opinions to me is probably not far to seek. It is the fact that I have exposed a mistake made by Witzel in a crucial part of his pro-AIT argumentation. In his paper “Rgvedic history”, he had mistranslated a verse from the Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra (18.44:397.9) to the effect that Ayu’s clan “went eastwards” while Amavasu’s clan “stayed at home in the west”, meaning in Afghanistan or Iran. So, there at long last was the hoped-for Vedic testimony to the Aryan invasion from the west, the “missing link” between Vedic literature and the elusive invasion. Pro-AIT crusaders like R.S. Sharma (Advent of the Aryans, p.87-89) have gleefully invoked the Harvard professor’s prestige in reproducing his OIT-shattering translation of Baudhayana, “the most explicit statement of an immigration into the Subcontinent”. But the translation was wrong. Like the “missing link” between ape and man found in Piltdown, it was a hoax, though presumably a somewhat bonafide hoax. As Prof. George Cardona and other authorities have meanwhile confirmed, the sentence describes how from a middle position (which we can infer to be somewhere in Haryana, India), one clan went east to the Ganga basin and another went west into Afghanistan. I have never accused Prof. Witzel of deceit or fraud. I prefer to live by Napoleon’s dictum: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained through incompetence”,-- or in this case, through over-enthusiasm for a long-hoped-for “discovery”. When people are very very thirsty, they start to see an oasis on the horizon; no malice intended, just self-delusion. Only, after his innocent mistake had been highlighted, Witzel’s reaction was rather unsportsmanlike. He claimed that it was all due to a printing error. That sounds a bit random for such a precise and sensational reading. As if you can put monkeys at a typewriter and let them produce an AIT-friendly translation by coincidence. What’s the big deal about standing corrected once in a while?"