If there is a peer-reviewed article, this newspaper article does not link to it.

Edit: This article is speculating what might be discovered even before the people doing the research have found something:

>... by the time the data collection is over, there would be enough to prove that this date can be pushed back to about 4500BC.

sigh

Edit 2: For context: The era of the proto-indo-european language family is dated to start around 4500 BC somewhere near the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

4500 BC would imply a culture that co-existed with the Harappa civilization. Such a discovery would have made news all around the world. This newspaper article would not be the first place to mention it.

I'm not convinced by any claim made by this article.

I agree with you on the main points. However, the reasoning behind proto-indo-european language family is weak, as it is not the only language family in India.

Oh I agree! If we assume the proto-zagrosian hypothesis is true and then assume that the munda language family existed in India along with the later dravidian languages or maybe even prior to that - there is no reason to believe that these account for all languages spoken in India around 8000BCE - 4000BCE.

Afaik, it’s still very possible that entire language families that were even older have now gone extinct.

My point was to show how old 4,500BCE was. As you point out, that alone doesn’t rule out a city at Varanasi around 4500BCE.