Or that’s the popular “Civilization of the Goddess” theory of the eccentric but interesting late UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas: the Early European Farmers enjoyed a Girls Rule / Boys Drool culture where life was sugar and spice and everything nice. But then the male-dominated Proto-Indo-Europeans (related to the Aryans who invaded India) with their horse drawn carts arrived from off the Pontic Steppe (roughly where the current war is being fought) and introduced male chauvinism (and killed off most of the men of Western Europe, but who remembers them?)

I had figured that Ken’s rather puzzling equine obsession in Barbie was just fodder for horse-crazy girls (in modern America, boys tend to like horses but not the way girls love horses). But I’m not rejecting this theory of the movie out of hand.

Gimbutas was an anti-Communist Lithuanian refugee from the Soviet takeover in 1945. She turned out to be mostly right about the invasion of steppe warriors being a huge event in Western European pre-history. Was she right about the previous Early European Farmer culture being a matriarchy?

A new study this week suggests: probably not:

On the other hand, it could be that Early European Farmer culture was less genocidally masculine than its Proto-Indo-European successor so that Gimbutas was not wholly wrong.

Also, this week, a new linguistics study on the origins of Indo-European languages suggests a homeland not on the steppe or in the main part of Anatolia, but just south of the Caucasus, such as in Armenia. From Science:

Almost half the world’s population speaks a language of the Indo-European language family. It remains unclear, however, where this family’s common ancestral language (Proto-Indo-European) was initially spoken and when and why it spread through Eurasia. The “Steppe” hypothesis posits an expansion out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, no earlier than 6500 years before present (yr B.P.), and mostly with horse-based pastoralism from ~5000 yr B.P. An alternative “Anatolian” or “farming” hypothesis posits that Indo-European dispersed with agriculture out of parts of the Fertile Crescent, beginning as early as ~9500 to 8500 yr B.P. Ancient DNA (aDNA) is now bringing valuable new perspectives, but these remain only indirect interpretations of language prehistory. In this study, we tested between the time-depth predictions of the Anatolian and Steppe hypotheses, directly from language data. We report a new framework for the chronology and divergence sequence of Indo-European, using Bayesian phylogenetic methods applied to an extensive new dataset of core vocabulary across 161 Indo-European languages. …

RESULTS
Few ancient written languages are returned as direct ancestors of modern clades. We find a median root age for Indo-European of ~8120 yr B.P. (95% highest posterior density: 6740 to 9610 yr B.P.). Our chronology is robust across a range of alternative phylogenetic models and sensitivity analyses that vary data subsets and other parameters. Indo-European had already diverged rapidly into multiple major branches by ~7000 yr B.P., without a coherent non-Anatolian core. Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.

CONCLUSION
Our results are not entirely consistent with either the Steppe hypothesis or the farming hypothesis. Recent aDNA evidence suggests that the Anatolian branch cannot be sourced to the steppe but rather to south of the Caucasus. For other branches, potential candidate expansion(s) out of the Yamnaya culture are detectable in aDNA, but some had only limited genetic impact. Our results reveal that these expansions from ~5000 yr B.P. onward also came too late for the language chronology of Indo-European divergence. They are consistent, however, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Corded Ware–associated expansions. Language phylogenetics and aDNA thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses.