That interpretation is speculative.
Not really, in any case far less than the imagined leaps in both the article that you provided a link to & the hypothesis that you have argued for.
Name transfers happen all the time. Just because there is a town called Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and it has churches in it, doesn't mean that it's the birthplace of Jesus.
Never said it doesn't, just that there is no evidence to suggest that name transfers did not take place in the opposite direction than what is alluded to(in the article) which is a more likely possibility considering that the
Sarasvati in India is now pretty much proven to be a much mightier river than the Helmand.
It simply could be the Iranians naming that over a distant memory. Considering that the Avesta has no knowledge of western Iran & its known areas include the Punjab, one could argue that it makes sense with an westward migration(not suggesting that is how it happened, just pointing out the obvious frailty of the argument made suggesting the opposite).
The absence of tigers, rice, etc also casts doubt on the early Vedics being Indian.
parts of the point already made by LaBong
True, rice is not directly mentioned
but neither is any other grain ,not wheat,not millet, not barley - the word
yava is accepted by almost all scholars to refer to grains in general & not specifically to barley which it was at a later time. This remains true of the entire length of the Rg veda including the later mandalas when according to even AIT proponents(and you), they were well settled in India.
However the basic argument itself falls apart because the Rg veda does make references to some items prepared out of rice -The Rigveda clearly refers to certain culinary preparations made from rice:
apupa and
purlns (types of rice cakes) and
odana (ricegruel).
As far as the lack of references to tigers go, while that is true in reference to the word
vyaghra, a purely aryan word which is not only possessing of a purely Indo-European etymology, but also having cognate forms in Iranian
babr and Armenian
vagr(odd, don't you think if they didn't know of tigers in those places); it has been argued that the word
Simha was used for both lions & tigers and (I have made a reference to this earlier too on a different thread) according to
Mark Kenoyer - the American archeologist,
it probably stood for the tiger rather than for the lion. In any case it remains unmentioned even when the later Rg veda mandalas are firmly placed within India. Add to that the fact that tigers were not unique only to the gangetic plains(( seals of Harappa and Mohenjodaro contain many pictorial representations of the tiger, even when they have none of the lion). In earlier times, tigers were found in Afghanistan, Iran & even central asia. There is simply no simple answer to this question of the tiger in the Rg veda, including the very simplistic assumption that the creature was not known, even in the period that AIT proponents argue was when there was deep penetration into the gangetic plains.
