Tamil Dravidians, Australoids and ancient Sumerians:

Quote:

"The second study concerns physical examination of Sumerian skulls. Buxton and Rice have
found that of 26 Sumerian crania they examined 22 were Australoid or Austrics. Further
According to Penniman who studied skulls from other Sumerian sites, the Australoid Eurafrican,
Austric and Armenoid were the "racial" types associated with the Sumerians. Here is Penniman's
description of the Austric type found at Sumer:

"These people are of medium stature, with complexion and hair like those of the Eurafrican, to
which race they are allied with dark eyes, and oval faces, broad noses, rather feeble jaws, and
slight sinewy bodies."
(The Austric Origin of the Sumerian Language, Language Form, vol. 22, no.1-2, Jan.-Dec.
1996.)

http://ezinearticles.com/?Tracing-the-Origin-of-Ancient-Sumerians&id=311587

Tamil Dravidians and Australian Aborigines:

Perhaps most similar to Australian languages are the Dravidian languages of southern India.
Tamil, for example, has five places of articulation in a single series of stops, paralleled by a
series of nasals, and no fricatives (thus approaching the Australian proportion of sonorants to
obstruents of 70% to 30%). Approaching the question from the opposite direction: according to
the latest WHO data on the prevalence of chronic otitis media (Acuin 2004:14ff), Aboriginal
Australians have the highest prevalence in the world 10-54%, according to Coates & al (2002),
up to 36% with perforations of the eardrum. They are followed at some distance by the Tamil
of southern India (7.8%, down from previous estimates of 16-34%), (from
http://www.flinders.edu.au/speechpath/Manly%20final.pdf)

Dr Rao and his colleagues sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of 966 people from traditional
tribes in India. They reported several of the Indian people studied had two regions of their
mitochondrial DNA that were identical to those found in modern day Australian Aboriginal
people. (http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/2011921/1/)

Also http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/9/173/abstract/

Then there is the Human Genome Project and here is what that has to say:

During his own journey in pursuit of the Y chromosome story in the late 1990s, Wells took blood
samples from males of Dravidian ancestry in southern India. The Dravidians were among Indias
earliest colonists; they now live among the descendants of a later wave of Sanskrit speakers
like Latin and ancient Greek, Sanskrit is an a branch of the Indo-European mother tongue,
more closely related to modern English and French than to Dravidian.

Wells was looking for a genetic marker called M130, the most ancient, non-African, Y-
chromosome marker. It is rare in Dravidians, but quite common in Australian Aboriginal males
and, intriguingly, in the Na Dene peoples of the Pacific north-west of North America.

The Na Dene peoples are descended from a second, later wave of immigrants into North
America, who were ultimately of Sino-Tibetan stock M130 is both the oldest non-African Y-
chromosome marker, and the most travelled.

Wells suspicion that M130 might have survived, at very low frequency, in southern coastal
regions of India, was proven correct the first African emigres left a durable calling card on the
coastal migratory route between Africa and Australia.

(http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article/131860/dr_wells_genetic_crusade)
(Tamil) Dravidians ARE the classical Sumerians:

The Mediterraneans (Eurafrican) or Dravidians were associated with the ancient Sumerian
civilizations of Mesopotamia and of Elam (southern Iran). Authors have pointed out ethnic,
linguistic and cultural affinities between the Sumerians (Mesopotamians) and the Dravidians of
South India, and concluded that both probably belonged to the same ethnic stock.

HR Hall writes:

"The ethnic type of the Sumerians, so strongly marked in their statues and reliefs was as different
from those of the races which surrounded them as was their language from those of the Semites,
Aryans and others; they were decidedly Indian in type. The face-type of the average Indian today
is no doubt much the same as that of the Dravidian race ancestors thousands of years ago...And it
is to this Dravidian ethnic type of India that the ancient Sumerian bears most resemblance, so far
as we can judge from his monuments. He was very like a Southern Hindu of the Deccan (who
still speaks Dravidian languages). And it is by no means improbable that the Sumerians were an
Indian tribe which passed, certainly by land, perhaps also by sea, through Persia to the valley of
the Two Rivers."

Hall is of the opinion that Dravidian people must have migrated to Mesopotamia from India,
whereas others think Dravidians came from Mediterranean regions, which was their earlier
home. KP Padmanabha Menon writes about their close relationship: Orientalists, many of them,
are prepared to concede that the Sumerians, the Mediterranean race, are branches of the early
Dravidians.

Others have traced the origins of the Sumerians, Elamites and so on back to Proto-Saharan
civilization back in Africa, anthropologist and linguist Dr. Clyde Winters etc. are of this opinion.