My opinion is that "Aryan" (a term which was only ever used by Iranians and Indians in ancient times, never by Europeans) is an overrated and overused term, and there is no evidence that "Aryans" played any important role in the original formation of civilizations. None of the early civilizations like Sumerians and Egyptians were Indo-European, and there is no evidence that any Indo-European people ever independently developed a concept of writing or written literature. Every writing system used by Indo-European peoples (without exception) is ultimately derived from Semitic writing systems, since writing and literate civilization first emerged in the Middle East.

The original Indo-Europeans, who seem to have originated from the steppes of what is now southern Russia, were probably more similar to the later Turks than to any civilized, sedentary people. They were probably a highly warlike and patriarchal group that were able to expand across vast swathes of land due to mastering the horse and chariot (perhaps the first people to do so), which gave them a huge military advantage over more sedentary groups. Indo-European expansion was probably spearheaded by males with a strong sense of wanderlust and desire to conquer new lands and acquire women. This probably explains why Y-DNA haplogroups like R1a (which is inherited exclusively through the paternal line) is widely distributed across Indo-European populations of Eurasia, but mtDNA (which is inherited exclusively through the maternal line) shows far higher diversity. Thus, IE expansion out of the steppe and both west into Europe as well as east into India and other regions would be similar to how Turks and Mongols would later burst out of the steppe to conquer vast swathes of lands and acquire women, leading to many men in Eurasia sharing Y-DNA with Turks/Mongols and large regions like Central Asia and Anatolia becoming Turkified (in the past, both Central Asia and Anatolia were dominated by various Indo-European groups).