--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "anthonyappleyard
<Anthony.Appleyard@...>" <Anthony.Appleyard@...> wrote:

> --- <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.)

I understand. The icy Gulf Stream whipped on and off into the
Mediterranean.

Torsten