Some of these scholars were also convinced that prehistoric Europe was populated by a dark-haired people, an opinion echoed even by relatively recent historians such as H. G. Wells. In a letter to the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, Sir Jones himself had written: "Many learned investigators of antiquity are fully persuaded, that a very old and almost primaeval language was in use among these northern nations, from which not only the Celtic dialects, but even the Greek and Latin are derived." In an important article entitled "On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India" which appeared in Asiatick Researches, Sir Jones, who was one of the first scholars to deal with comparative mythology also pointed out: "when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, without fancy or prejudice to colour them and improve the likeness, we can scarce help believing, that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations, who have adopted them".

In the eyes of many European scholars, since these prehistoric people of Europe were clearly neither of Negroid nor of Mongoloid origin, India, where the Europeans had discovered Sanskrit for themselves, and the ancient Indians were not entirely out of the picture in this context. This status of the ancient Indians which had been also forecasted by such ancient Indian cultural manifestations as the tens of thousands of megalithic monuments known as the burial tombs strewn all over India and by their counterparts which can be seen in many parts of Europe and ascribed to a prehistoric people of Europe called the Druids.

The few years Sir Jones spent in India constituted a critical juncture in the history of languages not only because of Sir Jones' above noted adumbration in 1786, but because at that point in time, he could have placed the concerned languages on the right tracks and defined their courses and ultimate destination with considerable accuracy if he had shown regarding Dravidian the same degree of curiosity, observation, and the ability to reach, form, and articulate hypothesis which he demonstrated concerning the Indo-European languages. By the close proximity of Sanskrit to Dravidian alone, indeed, by virtue of the fact that both of them are inseparable from India, the Indians, and the Indian phenomenon, Dravidian should have been of the utmost interest and consideration in any framework concerning the identity of the common source of Indo-European. But neither in his address which contained the above noted famous statement, nor in all his subsequent academic endeavour, Sir Jones hardly ever mentioned Dravidian. Such treatment of Dravidian detrimentally compounded since with innumerable and widely published assumptions, conjectures, misleading statements, and theories concerning its various aspects and its speakers, and the habit of scholars to endlessly repeat them without putting to test their basis, if any, has continued to this day unabated, and has resulted in keeping alive the so-called mystery concerning the identity of the common source of Indo-European and its speakers.