OK, Not taking sides at all, and the Wikipedia is hardly Cite seer I know, but...
A short google search reveals the following quotes...
So according to this it seems Nivek is right by arguably more or less ten centuries?
I guess the obvious thing now is if you have a source that proves otherwise and can predate any of this, post away.
Oh and Olivia, I really respect you and I started out to post you and ask. How do I break this shitty western cycle I am stuck in and hate so much, and embrace Buddhism and be a better person.
But in my googling I got side tracked.
The
Rigveda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is one of the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas. The text is a collection of 1,028 hymns and 10,600 verses, organized into ten books (
Mandalas). A good deal of the language is still obscure and many hymns as a consequence are unintelligible.
.................
Rigveda is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. Philological and linguistic evidence indicate that the Rigveda was composed in the north-western region of the Indian subcontinent,
most likely between c. 1500 and 1200 BC— though a wider approximation of c. 1700–1100 BC has also been given. The initial codification of the
Rigveda took place during the early Kuru kingdom (c. 1200 – c. 900 BCE).
AND
Buddhist Scriptures: Buddhist Bark Texts Found
Says...
The British Library / University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was founded in September 1996 in order to promote the study, editing, and publication of a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language that were acquired by the British Library in 1994.
The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia.