The dates of ancient texts from India are claimed over a whole wide range. There is as much as 2,000 years of divergence between the earliest speculative date and absolutely attested known date for the Vedas, for example. A good outline of the issues in historiography of India can be found in Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker[1], who was trained both as a mathematician and Sanskrit scholar. Not always knowing when a particular text was composed has a lot of influence on knowing or not knowing which ideas appeared in what era in the development of science and mathematics in India.

(One difference between India and either China or the near east is that the writing materials used in India, often plaited sheets of palm leaves, were much less durable than the silk sheets or bamboo slats used in China, or the fired clay tablets or papyrus sheets or parchment hides used in the near east. So many of the earliest writings from India have perished, while remarkably old writings still exist from either China or Sumer.)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-Plofker/dp/06911...

This is attributed to a 1985 writing by the (obscure) author named in the post here in many other online copy-and-paste postings of this same story. By now, there should be some follow-up on this, including identifying who "Rick Briggs" really is (just an imaginary character in an urban legend, or a real person from decades ago?) and what further artificial intelligence research has found out about various human languages.

By coincidence, I was just looking up reviews of the excellent book Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker,

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691120676

which I read a few years ago, just before I saw this post. There has been a lot of new scholarship about ancient India both in India and around the world since this submitted article was supposedly originally written, and here on Hacker NEWS we should be looking at more up-to-date information, I think.

Yes. The dates of ancient texts from India are often based on legend rather than history. (A similar phenomenon in China turns an actual 3,000 years of Chinese history, with reliably dated written records, into a proverbial "5,000 years of Chinese history," which counts eras of unhistorical legends recorded in later historical sources as though they were really historical.) An accessible, accurate, and honest book about mathematics in India is Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-Plofker/dp/06911...

The highly divergent Amazon reader reviews (I really ought to add my own five-star review, as I have read the whole book), and especially how divergent some of the Amazonian reviews are from the professional reviews of the book, show how controversial some of these issues are. The issue of the history of science and technology in India is tightly interwound with domestic politics in India. The whole notion of "Vedic mathematics" is based on willful misunderstandings of the sources. Plofker in footnote 7 from page 16 of Mathematics in India cites works by scholars in India who have dug into the primary sources, and disagree with the usual claims about "Vedic mathematics."

http://books.google.com/books?id=DHvThPNp9yMC&pg=PA16...