This is exciting news for a couple of reasons. 1. The origin of proto-dravidian and how it relates to other families is a huge mystery. There were speculations

This is exciting news for a couple of reasons. 1. The origin of proto-dravidian and how it relates to other families is a huge mystery. There were speculations that it could be related to Proto-Elamite or the Munda language family but nothing conclusive. Another fun speculation is that it was the language spoken by the people living in the Indus Valley cities. 2. Dr. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, probably the most prominent linguist who was studying dravidian languages passed away in 2012. There has been very little happening in dravidian linguistics. A while back, I was looking for scholarly articles regarding proto-dravidian and there hasn't been results since the early 2000s when it was demonstrated that Proto-dravidian split into north, central and southern branches (Note: I'm not an expert in this field, I might have missed some developments. Please point me to any research I might have missed). This result is exciting just because it looks like somebody is working on proto-dravidian again