Some people say Lithuanian has kept most of proto-Indo European features. If that's true, inanimate/neuter had to evolve later than gender split.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
For my part I'd say that it probably doesn't maintain them that much more than the huge number of other modern-day descendants of PIE.
Much like English spelling it's all a mess now.