Dorian Fuller's New Hypothesis on Indo-Aryans

Dorian Fulller published early this 2012 an online version of his 2011 article in the journal "Rice" entitled "Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures":

http://tinyurl.com/c494pz5

Fuller says that South Asian rice called "Oryza indica" reached its fully domesticated form only when hybridization with "Oryza japonica", from Chinese origin, took place, since the beginning of second millennium BC. He points out that this japonica crossed Central Asia (maybe through middlemen) more or less at the same time as Indo-Aryans expanded all over Northwestern and North Indian
Subcontinent (around 2000 BC),(see Fig.7 in page 86 from Fuller's paper). This figure is somewhat similar to Peter Bellwood's approach, except that Bellwood thinks the arrival was 1000 years earlier and related to wheat and barley crops through Iran and Fuller does not think the introduction of O. japonica into India was due to direct influence of Indo-Aryans, but that they adopted and cultivated
hybridized indica-japonica later.

Bellwood thinks that all Chalcolithic cultures from Ganges basin up to Deccan were Indo-Aryan speakers already in the second millennium BC, and Fuller thinks that "they were subsumed in Indo-Aryan languages ... partly due to elite dominance in the post-Harappan world, but the demographic impact of true rice agriculture, with improved hybridized domesticates,should be considered as a
major motor in the rise to dominance Indo-Aryan speakers and their internal spread within India (Fig.7). Their rice was rotated with pulses, wheat and barley, and fully integrated with pastoralism. It is not surprising then that during the second millennium BC, large sedentary settlements become widespread throughout the Ganges and eastern India (the plains of Orissa)"(Fuller 2011:87).

One interesting thing is that, based on Fig. 7, we can infer an economically productive Indo-Aryan initial presence within Chalcolithic cultures closer to 2000 BC rather than to 1000 BC as other scholars thought.

On the other hand, Fuller suggests large settlements in this Chalcolithic/Indo-Aryan phase, which later gave birth cities even at the beginning of first millennium BC, as it is the case of Painted Grey Ware Ahichhatra with more than 40 hectares around 900-800 BC.

However, the arrival of Indo-Aryans into Ganges Valley and Deccan (as Bellwood says) and Ganges Valley and Orissa (as Fuller says) could  not have been necessarily from Central Asia, but from Ghaggar-Hakra basin at the same time of japonica-indica hybridization, as great numbers of people from Northwestern South Asia moving towards Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh are attested in recent research at the beginning of Late Harappan times (see Giosan et al 2012:4, Fig 3,A and B), and no such a massive movement can be found archaeologically from Central Asia (not even a meagre movement attested by archaeology).