"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."