This is exciting news for a couple of reasons.<p>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.<p>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