--- <richard.wordingham@...> wrote (Re: Basque and Tamil):

> Dravidian is generally considered to be Nostratic. ...It's been
> suggested that Sumerian, Elamite and Dravidian form a group within
> Nostratic, ...

Perhaps Sumerian / Elamite / Dravidian was the language of the first
farmers to spread from the Middle East to India - or perhaps the
reverse. India likely had a climate stable enough for (stone-age)
agriculture during the Ice Age, where the land was dry enough for the
jungle to be able to be cleared by fire and stone axes, but:-

In the Ice Age much of the North Atlantic had a massive and likely
irregular input of surface ice-cold water from melting icebergs. That
made the Gulf Stream whip about all over the place, and (as oxygen
isotope ratios in deep cores from the Greenland ice cap show) the
climate there and in Europe was wildly unstable, far more than now,
and easily could change from like Paris to like Moscow in ten years,
and men were limited to nomadic hunting and food-gathering. This
effect likely spread everywhere where weather came in from the
Atlantic, and likely included the Middle East. (Ditto would have
happened to the weather in a traditionally placed Atlantic Atlantis -
don't hope on THAT place having been a start of civilization.)