Marija Gimbutas

"Local evolution cannot account for such abrupt changes (…) The pottery is relatable to the earliest Neolithic in the Middle Urals and Soviet Central Asia."

"We are still living under the sway of that aggressive male invasion and only beginning to discover our long alienation from our authentic European heritage—gylanic, nonviolent, earth-centered culture and its symbolic language, whose vestiges remain enmeshed in our own system of symbols."

"Early in her career, Gimbutas had been deeply sceptical of the original theory of mounted nomads from the Pontic Steppes spreading Indo-European languages into Europe, leaving kurgan burial mounds as their signature, but towards the end of it, she cast her initial methodological caution to the wind and turned a male gratification fantasy about mounted Übermenschen on its head to produce a feminist fantasy in which nasty, brutish nomads from the Steppes had destroyed the peaceful, matriarchal, earth goddess worshipping Neolithic cultures of the Balkans."