nationalist and Aryan indigenist views propagated by writers, such as David Frawley, who hold the conviction that Indo-Aryan peoples are the original Bronze Age inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and that the Indo-European language family originated in India. However, there are many problems with this hypothesis, particularly the cultural differences evident between the Indus River Civilisation and Indo-European cultures, such as the role of horses in the latter; as Parpola put it, "there is no escape from the fact that the horse played a central role in the Vedic and Iranian cultures". Additionally, the Indus script appears to lack evidence of prefixes, infixes, and inflectional endings, which Possehl has argued rules out an Indo-European language such as Sanskrit as the language of the Indus script. Munda language A less popular hypothesis suggests that the Indus script belongs to the Munda family of languages. This language family is spoken largely in Eastern India, and is related to some Southeast Asian languages. However, much like the Indo-Aryan language, the reconstructed vocabulary of early Munda does not reflect the Harappan culture, therefore, its candidacy for being the language of the Indus Civilisation is dim. Non-linguistic signs An opposing hypothesis is that these symbols are nonlinguistic signs which symbolise families, clans, gods, and religious concepts, and are similar to components of coats of arms or totem poles. In a 2004 article, Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel presented a number of arguments stating that the Indus script is nonlinguistic. The main ones are the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs (which increase over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilisation), and the lack of the random-looking sign repetition that is typical of language. Controversy Asko Parpola, reviewing the Farmer et al. thesis in 2005, stated that their arguments "can be easily controverted". He cited the presence of a large number of rare signs in Chinese and emphasised that there was "little reason for sign repetition in short seal texts written in an early logo-syllabic script". Revisiting the question in a 2008 lecture, Parpola took on each of the 10 main arguments of Farmer et al., presenting counterarguments for each. A 2009 paper published by Rajesh P.N. Rao, Iravatham Mahadevan and others in the journal Science also challenged the argument that the Indus script might have been a nonlinguistic symbol system. The paper concluded that the conditional