[Raj_Copi_Jin]

The name "Murukan", according to some scholars, comes from a proto-Dravidian word for youth, freshness or beauty. There are related words in many southern Dravidian languages, but none of them refer to a deity (with the obvious exception of Malayalam). In Konda, for example, "murku" means "young men". In Telugu, "murupu" means "tender beauty" or "grace". This would obviously place his roots quite firmly amongst Tamils.

Iravatham Mahadevan takes a different view of the etymology of "Murukan". As a result, he interprets one of the signs from the Indus Valley corpus as being a reference to Murukan, which would make his worship an extremely ancient tradition of the ancestors of the Tamils. See:

http://murugan.org/research/mahadevan.htm