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The motorcycle grip. Delayed release. Spine flexibility. An in-depth breakdown of the young PGA TOUR winner’s unique swing.
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Is Joaquin Niemann Jewish By Religion? His Wife And Family
There is no confirmation report on Joaquin Niemann’s religion. According to Wikipedia, Jew or Jewish people are those ethnoreligious groups …
Source: pimiso.com
Date Published: 1/6/2022
View: 8972
Is Joaquin Niemann Jewish By Religion? His Family – ZGR.net
There is no confirmation report on Joaquin Niemann’s religion. According to Wikipedia, Jew or Jewish people are those ethnoreligious groups …
Source: www.zgr.net
Date Published: 7/11/2022
View: 3840
Is Joaquin Niemann Jewish By Religion? His Family – 650.org
There is no confirmation report on Joaquin Niemann’s religion. According to Wikipedia, Jew or Jewish people are those ethnoreligious groups …
Source: www.650.org
Date Published: 10/5/2021
View: 2054
Joaquin Niemann Wins at The Greenbriar | Kermit Zarley
Twenty-year old Joaquin Niemann won A Tribute to the Military at The Greenbriar today in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia.
Source: www.patheos.com
Date Published: 10/10/2022
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Johann Niemann – Wikipedia
Johann Niemann (4 August 1913 – 14 October 1943) was a German SS and Holocaust perpetrator who was deputy commandant of Sobibor extermination camp during …
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Date Published: 4/20/2022
View: 8053
Augusta National Golf Club Has Been Masterful at Growing …
In 2018, Joaquin Niemann of Chile triumphed. He’s currently … As Tevye, the poor Jewish milkman living in the Ukrainian village of Anatevka,.
Source: www.ronsirak.com
Date Published: 12/29/2022
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A Nazi in the family – The Guardian
Derek Niemann would like to believe the best of his grandmother, who carried out … The order came back – Anne was not to speak to Jews.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Date Published: 12/15/2021
View: 5561
[Greenbrier D3] Joaquin Niemann -15, Ricky Werenski, Nate …
(AP) — Joaquin Niemann shot a 2-under 68 on Saturday to take a two-stroke … Europeans, Jews and pro-Western Muslims using any weapon the …
Source: m.blog.naver.com
Date Published: 4/20/2021
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TOUR Insider: As Asian market expands, so does its talent level
Dav Lipsky could be next. Born in L.A. to a Jewish father and Korean mother, Lipsky, who was an All-American while at Northwestern, won in …
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주제와 관련된 더 많은 사진을 참조하십시오 Breakdown of Joaquin Niemann’s golf swing. 댓글에서 더 많은 관련 이미지를 보거나 필요한 경우 더 많은 관련 기사를 볼 수 있습니다.
주제에 대한 기사 평가 is joaquin niemann jewish
- Author: PGA TOUR
- Views: 조회수 128,015회
- Likes: 좋아요 755개
- Date Published: 2020. 9. 17.
- Video Url link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unIHFT77deM
Is Joaquin Niemann Jewish By Religion? His Wife And Family
There is no confirmation report on Joaquin Niemann’s religion.
According to Wikipedia, Jew or Jewish people are those ethnoreligious groups originating from the Israelites and Hebrews. But Joaquin is from Santigo, Chile.
So, he can’t be Jewish. According to Golf, the young golf player’s native language is Spanish, and he adopted English.
He was born to Jorge Niemann and Pamela Zenteno. The golfer is 5,000 miles away from his family. Growing up in Sergio Garcia, Niemann transfixed the Spaniard’s tournament play across the world.
When he was in eighth grade, his father and mother divorced. The golfer has been closer to his mother and her large and extended family.
He followed his engineer father to Santiago, located an hour ago from his childhood home.
Joaquin Niemann Wins at The Greenbriar
Twenty-year old Joaquin Niemann, from Santiago Chili, won A Tribute to the Military at The Greenbriar in White Sulfur Spings, West Virginia, today on the PGA Tour. He set several records in doing so. The Latin American is the first golfer from Chili to ever win a PGA Tour tournament. And he joined twenty-year old Matthew Wolff, who won the 3M Open in June, to become one of the two youngest pro golfers to win on the PGA Tour in the same year since 1931. And he has become the youngest international winner on the PGA Tour since 1923.
But Niemann’s win today was not at all assured even though he started with the lead. For he started the last nine holes tied for the lead. But he finished the round with a 64 to win by six strokes over Tom Hoge. After Niemann won he said he just tried to stay relaxed today and enjoy the game. It looked like he accomplished his goal and then some. The television cameras showed him laughing and smiling a lot in his round.
Joaquin Niemann is six feet tall and weighs only 152 pounds. But he is no stranger to success in golf. Before turning pro over a year ago, he had won two world junior titles and was the #1 ranked amateur golfer in the world for 44 weeks.
Youth is taking over the game of professional golf. It has been happening on the LPGA Tour for quite some time. Now, it is happening on the PGA Tour. For an old guy like me, who played the PGA Tour and Champions Tour for many years, it is quite something to see.
In Joaquin’s swing when he hits his long shots, he has a substantial dip of his upper body. When a golfer does that, what is most noticeable is that it lowers the head by several inches at impact and somewhat afterwards compared to where the head is positioned at address. This swing feature results in a much more tilted spine at impact.
You can get away with that tilted spine during your youth. But in time–at least for a PGA Tour player who plays lots of golf and hits lots of practice balls–it can result in low back pain because it stresses the disks. Young Niemann would be wise to start trying to correct that by keeping more of what’s called “a level head” in his downswing. He should watch film of Ben Hogan’s swing and try to copy Hogan’s level head.
But I don’t have any advice for him with the short stick. It looks like he’s a phenomenal putter and has a ton of confidence. Plus, he plays fast, which can aid under pressure. I expect these young guns such as Niemann and Wolff to have very bright careers ahead of them in the pro game of golf.
Johann Niemann
For the heavy metal bassist, see Johan Niemann
Johann Niemann (4 August 1913 – 14 October 1943) was a German SS and Holocaust perpetrator who was deputy commandant of Sobibor extermination camp during Operation Reinhard. He also served as a Leichenverbrenner (corpse cremator) at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernburg during the Aktion T4, the SS “euthanasia” program. Niemann was killed during the Sobibor prisoner uprising in 1943.
SS career [ edit ]
Niemann joined the Nazi Party in 1931 as member number 753,836 and the SS in 1934 as member number 270,600. He first served at Bełżec extermination camp, where he commanded Camp II, the extermination area.[1] He then was transferred to Sobibor extermination camp. Niemann was deputy commander of Sobibor on various occasions in 1942 before being given the position permanently in early 1943. After Heinrich Himmler’s visit to Sobibor on 12 February 1943, Niemann was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer.[2]
Karl Frenzel, also a commandant at Sobibor, recalled how Niemann handled a particular threat of prisoner revolt within the camp:[3][4]
A Polish Kapo told me that some Dutch Jews were organizing an escape, so I relayed it to Deputy Commandant Niemann. He ordered the seventy-two Jews to be executed.
On 14 October 1943, a prisoner uprising took place at the Sobibor camp. Niemann was the highest-ranking SS officer who was on duty that day, and so he was the first person targeted to be assassinated by the prisoners. In an appointment to be fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew[5] Niemann was killed in the tailor’s barracks with an axe to his head by Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army soldier imprisoned at Sobibor.[6]
In 2020, Niemann’s wartime photo album was made public by his descendants. The collection of photographs is known as the Sobibor perpetrator album.[7][8]
Niemann was played by Henry Stolow in the 1987 English film Escape from Sobibor, and by Maximilian Dirr in the 2018 Russian film Sobibor.
Niemann’s Awards/Decorations and ranks in the SS and NSDAP (or Nazi Party) were as follows:
Ranks: SS-Unterscharführer, SS-Scharführer, SS-Oberscharführer, SS-Hauptscharführer, Niemann’s last promotion to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer by SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler on February 12, 1943.
Awards: DRL-Sports Badge in Bronze, War Merit Cross 2nd Class With Swords, Sudetenland Medal, Heer Long Service Medal.
References [ edit ]
Media related to Johann Niemann at Wikimedia Commons
A Nazi in the family
My German grandmother lived in Berlin during the war and saw through all but one of the Nazis. Minna Niemann poured scorn on the man she called Herr Hitler and lambasted his odious deputies: “That Goebbels is a gangster!” she would declare indignantly. Within four walls, the woman who was adored by all who knew her carried out private acts of resistance. On the birth of her fourth child, she was awarded the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross) to mark her achievement in producing Aryan offspring. She threw her medal straight into the bin. Every winter, the family was sent a candle that was meant to be lit in a shrine, a kind of Nazi alternative to Christmas. Minna expressed her contempt and loathing for this affront to her Lutheran faith by disposing of it at once.
Men in dirty striped uniforms came to the house, bringing furniture they had made, fitting bunk beds for the children, building an air-raid shelter and carrying out general repairs. These were concentration camp inmates from Sachsenhausen and its satellite camps. Though it was strictly verboten, Minna spoke to them and brought coffee and cake. My dad remembered the poor, half-starved men telling her how much they liked coming to their house.
My grandmother’s antipathy towards the regime boiled over in the last months of the war, at a time when the merest whiff of dissent saw offenders hanged from lampposts in the streets. She spoke out often, and loudly. Her daughter Anne wrote a worried “What are we going to do about Mother?” letter to her boy soldier brother, Dieter. The family began to fear that their phone was tapped.
For all her evident opposition to the Nazis, there was one man who escaped Minna’s wrath and condemnation, her husband, Karl. Less than three years ago, I found out the truth about my grandfather – he was a committed member of the Nazi party, an SS officer, a manager of slave labour in Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps. How was it possible for my grandmother to live a life of glaring contradictions?
My grandmother, a seamstress, met Karl Niemann, a bank clerk, in the pied piper town of Hameln (Hamelin)in 1912. Their relationship would last 48 years, though it would be marked by long periods of separation. The first came in August 1914, when Karl went off to fight. Wounded and captured by the French, he remained in a prisoner of war camp until March 1920. Minna waited six years for her fiancé to return – they married the following year.
Minna and Karl in 1927, newly married.
In the weeks after Minna gave birth to Anne, the couple’s first child, Karl brought home his wages in a wheelbarrow. Germany was in financial meltdown, with rampant hyperinflation. The economy recovered, and shortly after the birth of their son, Dieter, Karl took a job as an auditor in a private company and the family moved to Dortmund.
Three years later, in 1929, came the Wall Street crash. In the midst of soaring unemployment and pitched battles between factions on the right and left, Karl joined the Nazi Party, immediately becoming a minor official. In the year Hitler came to power, Minna, pregnant with my dad, was pictured with her uniformed husband, an Oliver Hardy lookalike wearing swastikas. There was nothing funny about a man who was under instructions to inform the Gestapo about people who showed suspect political views.
The couple had three young children to feed when Karl, the only Nazi in the company, fell out with his boss and was sacked. They were now in desperate straits. Their landlord knew an influential man who had gone to the same school as Karl and could perhaps find him a job. He happened to be Heinrich Himmler’s deputy.
I do not know what Minna thought of her husband going to work for the SS. Perhaps it was enough for her that he had a job again, and a fairly well-paid one at that. Karl went on ahead to Bavaria to be inducted into the SS, settle into his new post and find accommodation. Minna stayed behind with her children and wrote to Karl that Anne had a new friend and visited her often at home. The order came back – Anne was not to speak to Jews.
My uncle told me that his mother did not want him associated with the town where she took her family to live in early 1936: Dachau. She went to a hospital in the next town to make sure that he would not have Dachau on his birth certificate. My uncle was christened Ekart Josef, after Karl’s colleague (and presumably friend) Josef Spacil, a dubious character who made off with much of the Reich’s gold bullion at the end of the war.
Minna with two of her children.
Initially, Karl worked as an auditor for an SS complex next door to the concentration camp, but his job morphed into managing slave labourers from the camp itself. SS officers and their families were expected to socialise freely. Minna went on day trips to the Alps with her husband’s colleagues and their wives.
A year before war broke out, Karl’s job relocated to Berlin and Minna brought the children to live on an estate purpose-built for SS families. She played the subordinate, domestic role that Hitler’s Germany demanded, an ideology that reduced women’s role to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Karl, meanwhile, had become a business manager for the SS, travelling through occupied Europe to inspect his concentration camp “factories”, undoubtedly witnessing scenes of unimaginable brutality.
How much of what he saw did he bring home to his wife? My dad remembered his father guarding an inner world: “He was very much his own man.”
As a child of 11, my dad witnessed – and remembered – a telling conversation between his parents. In April 1945, as Russians closed in on Berlin, the men in Karl’s office were redeployed with their families to the Alps. The entourage halted for two or three days at Dachau, sleeping in the bunks of former guards. My father watched as Karl and Minna looked out at a low building with tall chimneys. There was smoke rising from the chimneys. “You know what they’re doing there?” asked Minna. “They’re killing the Jews and burning the bodies.” Karl was quick in his denial: “No, they wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, they would,” replied his wife. “Can’t you smell the flesh?”
Minna with her son, Dieter.
So Minna knew, as many in Berlin did, something of what was happening in the Holocaust. Either she believed her husband didn’t know or she was testing his level of knowledge. When the family reached their dead end, an isolated lodge at the top of an Alpine valley, Minna said bitterly: “Look where your Herr Hitler has got us now.”
The day after Germany surrendered, American soldiers came for Karl: he served three years’ internment in former PoW camps. Minna took her children back to Hameln, where she proceeded to delete the past. All of the photographs of old Nazis disappeared. She hung up a picture of her dead soldier son, Dieter, after carefully obliterating the SS flashes on his uniform with a pencil. And, in common with millions of other Germans, they did not talk about what had happened.
None of the family had ever seen the papers from Karl’s tribunal until I tracked them down in a Hannover archive two years ago. They drew out the remarkable story of the man who came to dinner. My dad recalled his mother saving the family’s meat ration to share with a thin guest who came on Sundays late in the war. He was a former concentration camp inmate, whom Karl had had released from Dachau to work for him. And, it transpires, there were others. Karl emerged as a man of complex motivations, fixing deals with the Gestapo to have inmates freed. Some of those inmates testified in his favour at his tribunal. My dad had always clung to a story, garbled in family mythology, that his father was “the only one who treated inmates like human beings”.
Karl Niemann in Berlin.
Even so, the judge condemned Karl for expressing no remorse about exploiting people reduced to slavery. I had assumed that the broken man who returned from prison was overwhelmed with guilt. Was that the case? I simply don’t know.
As for Minna, the historian Katharina von Kellenbach said of the wives of Holocaust perpetrators: “We can safely assume that many of them knew enough of their husbands’ assignments to conclude that they would be better off not knowing more of the sordid details.” And so I imagine the couple lived out the rest of their lives with a giant barbed wire elephant in the room.
I cannot question my grandmother, who died before I was born. I would love to believe that her little acts of resistance and kindness within a Nazi enclave represented some kind of heroism. But I have come to accept that, like millions of other Germans, she put her own family’s welfare first and shut her eyes and ears to what was going on outside her home. My dad and uncle said their parents were mutually devoted to the end. But did Minna ever look at Karl and wonder about the dark things that remained in his head?
[Greenbrier D3] Joaquin Niemann -15, Ricky Werenski, Nate Lashley, Robby Shelton -13, Adam Long, Scottie Scheffler -12, Joseph Bramlett, Harris English -11, Sungjae Im ,Patrick Rodgers, Tome Hoge -10,
Good morning, it’s 9 o’clock sharp, Sunday, September 15, 2019.
安寧하십니까? 2019년 9월 14일(土) 午前 10時 40分입니다.
컷에 걸렸던 보 호슬러 는 마지막 파4, 9番 홀에서 108야드를 남기고 1.2미터에 붙여 버디를 잡으면서 컷(-4)을 通過합니다.
(午後 4時 33分) 어미 고양이(‘삼발이’)가 밥을 못 얻어먹어서인지 우리 집에 와서 새깨 두 놈과 같이 點心을 합니다.
(5:28) 이스라엘 의회 크네셋 의 다수결 정족手는 61席이라고 합니다.
(밤 7時 14分) 벌써 바깥은 깜깜합니다.
(9:05) KLM오픈 셋 째 날, 王정훈 이 6언더, 共同26位로 順位를 끌어올립니다. 첫 날에는 5,8,11,18番 홀에서 버디를 잡았고, 둘 째 날에는 2,8,12,15,16,18番 홀, 셋 째 날에는 8,9,13,15,16,18番 홀에서 버디를 잡았지만 보기도 첫 날 10,12,15,17番 홀, 둘 째 날 14,17番 홀, 셋 째 날 7,14番 홀에서 하고 1番 홀에서는 더블 보기까지 하면서 +16, -10으로 6언더를 합니다. 先頭는 서드 라운드 초반 11언더 파입니다 (-15로 끝남).
(15일, 日, 새벽 0時 7分) 아내가 있어야 할 것같습니다.
(1:00 a.m.) 安병훈 이 첫 홀을 始作하였습니다. 姜성훈 은 14홀 이븐 파, 4언더, 共同52位입니다. 임성재 는 한 時間 後인 2時 5分에 出發합니다.
(5時 15分) 雲雨 後에 잘자고 내려왔더니 임성재가 12,14,15番 홀 버디를 잡으며 11언더, 共同6位까지 오릅니다. JTBC 골프에서 디오픈에 뛴 임성재의 父母 모습을 처음 보았습니다.
(7:24) 벼락 危險 때문에 中斷되었던 그린브라이어 서드 라운드가 續開되어 코스에는 지금 호아퀸 니만 (H15, -14, 1st), 라비 쉘턴 (H16, -13, T2), 아담 롱 (H16, -13, T2) 等 여섯 名이 플레이하고 있습니다. 임성재 (-10, T8), 안병훈 (-7, T28), 姜성훈 (-5, T45) 順입니다.
(8:51) 임성재(-10, T8)가 다섯 打 差를 克服하고 優勝할 수 있을까요, 來日 아침에?
Niemann takes 2-shot lead into final round at The Greenbrier
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. (AP) — Joaquin Niemann shot a 2-under 68 on Saturday to take a two-stroke in the A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier.
Trying to become the first player from Chile to win on the PGA Tour, the 20-year-old Niemann was 15 under with a round left in the season-opening event at the Old White TPC.
No third-round leader has gone on to win the tournament.
Nate Lashley, Richy Werenski and Robby Shelton were tied for second. Lashley and Werenski shot 65, and Shelton had a 70.
Adam Long and Scotty Scheffler were 12 under. Long shot 70, and Scheffler had a 71.
Kevin Chappell couldn’t capitalize on the 11-under 59 he shot Friday, the 11th sub-60 round in tour history. He had a 73 on Saturday and was eight strokes behind Niemann.
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. (AP) — Joaquin Niemann was an 18-year-old amateur when he arrived in West Virginia two years ago and tied for 29th in the only PGA Tour event he played outside of the U.S. Open.
In 2018, he improved to a tie for fifth at the tournament.
Now he has a chance to become the first player from Chile to win on tour.
Niemann shot a 2-under 68 on Saturday to take a two-stroke lead in A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier.
The 20-year-old Niemann was 15 under with a round left in the season-opening event at the Old White TPC.
“I just feel like I’m almost a member here,” Niemann said. “I just like being out here. Always when you play on a course that you know already it helps a lot. I think this is the course I have played more on tour.”
Niemann had a bogey and three birdies, including a 4-foot putt on the par-5 17th.
“I’m just really happy the way I’ve been playing,” Niemann said. “This course is really good for me.”
No third-round leader has gone on to win the tournament.
Nate Lashley, Richy Werenski and Robby Shelton were tied for second at 13 under. Lashley and Werenski shot 65, and Shelton had a 70.
Adam Long and Scotty Scheffler were 12 under. Long shot 70, and Scheffler had a 71.
Lashley’s story is well known by now. In 2004 his parents and girlfriend were killed in a plane crash in Wyoming. After resuming his career in the PGA Tour’s minor leagues, he won his first tour title at the inaugural Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit in June after slipping into the field as an alternate.
“My mentality is I’m definitely a lot more relaxed,” Lashley said. “I’m just playing, just trying to take that as experience, the way I played in Detroit. You know, I really just kind of kept to myself that week and really just focused and tried to block everything else out. I feel like I’ve done a good job of that so far.”
Lashley made bogeys after finding the rough on the par-4 11th and the greenside bunker on the par-3 15th. He chipped in for eagle from 36 feet at No. 17.
His tee shot on the 179-yard 18th came as thunderstorms arrived in the area and play was suspended for about 50 minutes. Upon returning, Lashley three-putted from 70 feet.
Werensky finished No. 126 in the FedEx Cup standings last season, one spot from qualifying for the playoffs. He got his PGA Tour card back for this season in the Korn Ferry Tour Finals.
Werensky said that he didn’t get discouraged after missing the playoffs. Heading into the Korn Ferry Finals, “I had like a, I don’t want to say an epiphany, but just like, ’Hey, man just chill out. Relax. I know I’m good enough.”
Shelton was tied for the lead with Niemann and Scheffler after the second round. Shelton was 2 over for the day until making birdies at the par-5 12th and par-4 14th.
He hopes to use his two wins on the Korn Ferry Tour last season to help stay calm Sunday.
“You got to be super patient,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard to do, but hopefully I can manage my nerves tomorrow.”
Kevin Chappell couldn’t capitalize on the 11-under 59 he shot Friday, the 11th sub-60 round in tour history. He had a 73 on Saturday and was eight strokes behind Niemann.
Golf: Young Chilean Niemann takes command in West Virginia
(Reuters) – Chile’s Joaquin Niemann shook off his first bogey of the week to take a two-shot lead into the final round of the Greenbrier Classic in West Virginia on Saturday.
The 20-year-old, seeking to become the first from his South American nation to win a PGA tournament, shot a two-under 68 on a day when playing conditions toughened to finish at 15-under 195.
Americans Richy Werenski (65), Nate Lashley (65) and Robby Shelton (70) were tied for second at 13 under at White Sulphur Springs.
Adam Long (70) and Scottie Scheffler (71), the second round co-leader with Niemann and Shelton, were another stroke back.
Lashley, with an eagle at the 17th, had shared the lead with Niemann before a bogey at the last.
Kevin Chappell also had his troubles.
After becoming the 10th player to break 60 on the PGA Tour with a 59 on Friday, the American soared to a three-over par 73 with four bogeys.
Niemann, in his third season on the tour, had played 46 holes without a bogey.
But the streak ended after an errant tee shot at the 11th.
He rebounded with five pars and a birdie at the 17th before closing with another par that came after a 49-minute weather delay.
(-15, first) Joaquin Niemann, of Chile, watches his tee shot on the 12th hole during the third round of A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019
(-13, T2) Nate Lashley reacts to an eagle chip on the 17th green during the third round
(-13, T2) Robby Shelton lines up a putt on the 11th hole
(-13, T2) Richy Werenski chips up to the 17th green
Jerry Kelly leads PGA Tour Champions’ Ally Challenge
GRAND BLANC, Mich. — Jerry Kelly birdied the first five holes on the back nine and finished with a 7-under 65 on Saturday to take a one-stroke lead into the final round of the PGA Tour Champions’ Ally Challenge.
Kelly had a 12-under 132 total at rain-softened Warwick Hills, the longtime home of the PGA Tour’s defunct Buick Open. He won the American Family Insurance Championship in June in his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, for his fourth victory on the 50-and-over tour.
“You always have to go low out here,” Kelly said. “Somebody’s always going to shoot a good score and I’m glad it was me today.”
Charles Schwab Cup points leader Scott McCarron was tied for second with Woody Auston. McCarron, a three-time winner this season, birdied four of the last five holes in a 67.
“Any time you can finish like that, it’s a pretty good day,” McCarron said. “I didn’t really get anything going for most of the day, but I was hitting it well and I was hitting good putts, they weren’t going in, so I just had to stay really patient.”
Austin shot 65.
Bernhard Langer (67), Jerry Smith (68) and Tom Gillis (69) were 9 under.
Garcia, Shinkwin share KLM Open lead after 3rd round
AMSTERDAM — Sergio Garcia and Callum Shinkwin shot 6-under 66s and shared the lead at 15 under after the third round of the KLM Open on Saturday.
Playing together in the second-to-last pairing at The International on the outskirts of Amsterdam, Garcia and Shinkwin traded birdies all day.
Garcia drew level on the par-5 18th, just missing a tricky eagle putt over a slope on the undulating green before tapping in for birdie, while Shinkwin could manage only a par after finding a bunker behind the green with his second shot.
The Spaniard has made just one bogey in the first three rounds.
“That’s always a nice thing to have on a week,” Garcia said. “Enjoying that, and we’ll try to do more of the same tomorrow.”
Nicolai Hojgaard, an 18-year-old Dane, was alone in third place, two strokes back.
The Obscenity of Curves
Oversexualizing female athletes is dangerous.
(NYT, Amanda MacLean, Sept. 14, 2019)
Last week, a 17-year-old champion swimmer in Anchorage was disqualified at a swim meet because of how her team swimsuit fit her body. After successfully beating her opponent in a race, Breckyn Willis of Dimond High School was stripped of her victory because her suit was deemed to have violated code: Her buttocks were exposed.
Although her win was later reinstated, the story gained national attention for the discriminatory treatment the teenager received because of her body type. The suit was the very same as the swimsuits her teammates were wearing. However, Ms. Willis was singled out because of the way it fit her body specifically. As a young woman endowed with curves, the suit simply hung differently on her frame. Instead of being evaluated and praised for her athletic merit after the win, her body was unfairly judged as transforming an ordinary swimsuit into something obscene.
While this story elicited justifiable outrage, many of us curvier women received it with empathy and a complete lack of surprise. When you have a curvier body type, you quickly become accustomed to being judged and oversexualized based solely on your appearance and the way things fit. It doesn’t matter if you are 10 years old and blooming early, 40 years old and wearing something that appears “inappropriate for your age,” or 17 years old and filling out your swimsuit in a way that’s being seen as a threat to modesty — you will carry the burden of anxiety when it comes to your body and the way it is perceived by others. The added responsibility of trying to moderate those perceptions becomes your cross to bear.
My own puberty struck early, bringing with it the crippling awareness of the way those emergent curves shaped the way I was perceived. Although our society holds a standard that romanticizes the hourglass figure, the truth is less romantic than it is salacious. You learn quickly that you will receive attention that you don’t want, haven’t invited and are little equipped to handle emotionally. Assumptions will be made about your character — and when you’re young, the truth has very little merit when it comes to schoolyard gossip. The worst part is that the other kids are not the only ones who make these judgments. Adults will also burden you with their gaze and all of the unspoken judgment it contains. I began to hate my body from an early age, and would desperately wish away those pieces of me that were “too much.”
Developing into adulthood under these circumstances, it was easy to learn a paranoia about the male gaze, and the threats that could come along with “inviting” attention. Similarly, I became keenly aware that this same attention could attract the ire of women. As my curves grew, I became uncomfortably familiar with the look in people’s eyes as they mentally stripped me down and deemed me a sexual object. I recognize that look from being a 12-year-old getting leered at by grown men, and I’m familiar with it from being given the cold shoulder by other women, deemed a lurid distraction to their boyfriends or their sons.
In my youth and still somewhat to this date, I learned to view my body as a threat, both to myself and to others. Taking care to cover those bits that act as a sexual signal felt like a necessary step to de-weaponize my body.
Although the issue of clothing may seem like a mundane one, in reality it can become a daily anxiety. You are free to dress as you like, sure, but never distant in your mind is the fact that how those clothes hug your body can be tantamount to a scarlet letter. Just as heavier women are assumed to be “unhealthy,” and skinny women are evaluated as “needing a sandwich,” you are cast as a harlot; a man-eater. A simple T-shirt over an ample bosom is rendered obscene, and you mustn’t be too tempting. Dressing becomes an exercise in people pleasing, and trying to attract the least amount of attention. Clothing simply doesn’t look the same on you.
Although I am now 36, this caution never left me, and it is as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth or tying my shoes. It is with me when I go shopping and lean over in front of the fitting room mirror to ensure my chest won’t be exposed. It is with me when I wear a dress, and put shorts on underneath. It is with me when I wear loose cardigans in the summer because I feel as if there is an extra layer between my body and the eyes of those who may decide to hypersexualize me based only on my hip to waist ratio.
Ultimately, the virality of Breckyn Willis’s story led to a reversal of the decision to disqualify her. Even so, she is a teenager who was discriminated against for her shape. Her body, and whether it fit “acceptably” into a sports uniform, has made national headlines. The damage has been done. This wasn’t the first time she was objectified by adults on the basis of her figure. The sad reality is that it probably won’t be the last.
One can only hope that the attention this story is getting is serving the purpose of amplifying just how pervasive the stigma toward the female body can be. At the very least, the institutions that are set up to serve young women should be a safe space that protects their dignity and self-esteem. This means that schools and sports teams should be mindful that they aren’t ostracizing girls based on arbitrary modesty codes that have the effect of penalizing certain body types. When they do this, they are not only participating in the oversexualization of these girls, but they give power to the negative attitudes toward curvier body types by turning them into policy.
A swimming pool in Arles, France, 1991
Mermaids Have Always Been Black
The uproar over Disney casting Halle Bailey as the Little Mermaid overlooks generations of Caribbean and African folklore.
(NYT, Tracey Baptiste, July 10, 2019)
As a young child growing up in Trinidad and Tobago within sight and walking distance of the Caribbean Sea, I was gripped by the intrigue of mermaids. I was introduced to one version of a mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, whose tale of a magical girl creature, an impossible location and an outrageous desire was thrilling.
But I already knew mermaids. We spent most weekends on the beach. There were plenty about. Every cousin, aunt and uncle who threw me in the waves and laugh-shouted at me to swim back to shore seemed to know that we were all part of the sea.
My father, in particular, was a surrogate Poseidon. He would strike out into open water, disappearing for minutes at a time behind huge waves, then appear again, hanging off the side of a fishing boat, where he rested, chatted with the fishermen and then swam back to shore. I didn’t need a Danish fairy tale to tell me that he was part fish. By the time I came across Andersen’s tale, I already knew that mermaids were black and brown people: my family. Besides, what happens when you stay out on the sea? You get darker and darker, deepening to shades of black and brown that glow from absorbing the sun.
It was in this state last week that I first heard about Disney’s decision to cast the black teenage actress and singer Halle Bailey (of Chloe x Halle fame) in the title role for “The Little Mermaid,” and the flood of white people’s tears over it. When the announcement was made, I was swimming in the sea off the Bahamas, getting sunburned as fish swam past me. A lifeguard had just warned me that there were baby sharks about. Was I concerned? Honey, please. This was my natural state.
Back in my hotel room, I turned on my phone for a bit, and several notifications came in, people tagging me in social media posts. The Wi-Fi was spotty, so it was another day or so before I figured out what was going on. I laughed. It was so laughable, this idea that a mermaid couldn’t be black. Didn’t they know?
When I wrote Mama D’Leau into my series of middle grade novels, The Jumbies, I didn’t have to stretch my imagination very far from home. Aiming at kids who don’t know Caribbean folklore, and Caribbean parents who maybe had forgotten it, I reimagined supernatural creatures I had known since I was a child.
Mama D’Leau in the oral tradition was huge and hideous, fierce and unstoppable. She ruled the water, both river and sea alike, and reveled in upturning fishing boats by whipping her powerful anaconda tail and watching her victims drown in the blue. As a young feminist, I was delighted by the idea of such a powerful and free woman, the murder notwithstanding. In my story, I made her as beautiful and well coifed as any of my aunts, and just as fearsome as the stories — or again, any of the aunties.
Mama D’Leau always existed in my imagination. I worried when my father swam out so far that I couldn’t see him, and worried again that the creature would capsize the boat he was hanging on to before he could swim back. In the stories, Mama D’Leau never cared whom she killed. It was sport. Though, same as any fisherman, I suppose. I don’t remember when I figured out that this was only a story.
The story likely started during chattel slavery, when people were kidnapped from the west coast of Africa and brought to the Caribbean and the Americas. The mother of the sea came with them because she already existed in West Africa as Mami Wata, a deity who promised fertility and prosperity to her devotees. It was incredibly good luck to encounter her in person. In West Africa, the goddess was beautiful, sometimes appearing fully as a woman, sometimes as a woman with a fish tail, sometimes with two fish tails. Check your Starbucks cup to see how she’s been co-opted.
But West Africa is not the only place where the idea of a mermaid existed. In Mali, the Dogon people have an origin story involving fish creatures called nommos. The sky god Amma is responsible for creating these half-fish half-people as the first living creatures on earth. Drawings and carvings of nommos exist throughout Dogon culture. In South Africa, the Khoi-san people have stories of mermaids despite living in an arid area.
Water spirits abound in African stories. Water was the thin veil that separated the spirit from the real world, and those who could conquer water were believed to have strong powers. It’s not a surprise that the idea of half-fish half-people would have begun there.
Black mermaids have always existed: long before Andersen, certainly long before Disney. Given the way African stories have been taken and twisted, I wonder just where Andersen got his idea in the first place. He was writing at the height of the colonial period as people were being stripped from African lands, clinging to the stories that made them who they were. The focus on Eurocentric stories and storytelling has done us a disservice, leaving most totally ignorant of the fact that mermaid stories have been told throughout the African continent for millenniums. Mermaids are not just part of the imagination, either, but a part of the living culture.
In the heart of Africa, Africans and people of the diaspora, mermaids are not only real, but there is an inherent sense that they can affect your life, your hopes and your prospects. The idea of this is whispered into our DNA.
We know there are black mermaids. We have seen them. We have been them. They are walking around right now, everywhere, waiting for the sea.
A relief sculpture of the goddess Mami Wata on the wall of a voodoo temple in Benin.
Here are the first victims of the PGA Tour’s new cut rule (it was a massacre)
(golf.com, Kevin Cunningham, September 14, 2019)
The PGA Tour instituted a new cut rule for the 2019-20 season which went into effect for the first time this week. The goal of the rule was to reduce the number of players making the cut. And it was a massacre.
Under the new rule, only the Top 65 players and ties will make the cut after the first two rounds and continue to play the third and fourth rounds on the weekend. Previously, the Top 70 and ties made the cut. On Friday at A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier, the first event of the new season, the difference could not have been more stark.
With low scores proliferating on the Old White TPC course, the cut line ended up at four under. Twenty-one players narrowly made the cut on the number, while 16 players finished one shot short at three under. The fortunate players at four under were T48 after Round 2, which means the group of players at three under finished T69.
If you already put two and two together, you’ve realized that all 16 of those players at three under would have made the cut under the old cut rule. Instead, thanks to the new cut rule all 16 of them are heading home with no money to show for their hard work this week.
Here are the first-ever victims of the new PGA Tour cut rule:
Sepp Straka, Scott Stallings, Fabián Gómez, Kevin Streelman, Jason Kokrak, Talor Gooch, Adam Schenk, Matthew NeSmith, Tyler Duncan, Chase Seiffert, Matt Every, Nick Watney, Ted Potter Jr., J.B. Holmes, Bo Hoag, and Seamus Power.
Nick Watney finished T69 at the Greenbrier and missed the cut.
To be fair to the Tour, this is just about the worst-case scenario when it comes to the effect of the new cut rule. If two additional players at three under had made one more birdie and finished at four under, the players at three under would have tied for 71 and missed the cut under the old rule as well.
But that didn’t happen. If this tournament had occurred just a few weeks earlier, all of them would be getting ready to tee off in Round 3. Instead, those 16 players missed the cut, and missed an opportunity to go low on Saturday and Sunday and collect valuable FedEx points and, of course, money.
PGA Tour’s new cut rule is already causing confusion and concern
(golf.com, Kevin Cunningham, September 13, 2019)
If you’re not constantly plugged into the golf world, you may not have realized that a new PGA Tour season started this week with A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier. Even if you are on top of your pro golf, you probably didn’t notice that a key rule change went into effect this week as well, and it’s already causing confusion and concern among some Tour pros.
The change in question is the PGA Tour’s brand-new cut rule. Beginning this season, the number of players making the cut at normal Tour events drops from the Top 70 and ties to the Top 65 and ties. The cause for the change is suspected to be the rise of MDF finishes on Tour in recent years. MDF stands for Made Cut, Didn’t Finish, and to this point happened when 78 or more players made the initial 36-hole cut, forcing a secondary cut to occur after 54 holes. It’s a rule the Tour instituted in 2008 to lower final round sizes to 70 or less. While the MDF players don’t get to play the final round (and miss out on whatever tiny chance they have of going really low and winning), they still receive a minimum check of around $9,000.
Bubba Watson expressed concer about the new cut rule at the Greenbrier
While it may not sound like reducing the number of players making the cut by five is that big of a deal, remember that those players in positions 66-70 won’t make any money for their troubles that week.
Several players were asked about the change this week, and their responses varied from support to concern, while one young pro was barely aware of the change.
Kevin Na, the defending champion this week at The Greenbrier, had a mixed response.
“For my pension it’s not very good,” Na joked. “It could not affect you for the whole year. You know what I mean? You might not be in that bubble. You might be — the one time it’s 68 or 69 or 70 you might not be on that cut line. You might be well in it or well out of it.”
Ultimately, Na “doesn’t mind” the change, though he did note the fact that “there are times where you do make a cut on the number and guys do go on to win a tournament.”
While it’s likely Na is right, and the new rule might prove to have little effect on Tour, it is possible that a player regularly finishes from 66-70 in the new season, and misses out on lots of money, FedEx points, and Tour status. In other words, it’s still going to burn for those few unlucky players each week, even if “everybody knows” the rule before the tournament starts, as Na argued.
And already at the first event of the new season, there is at least one player who didn’t knew about the rule. Newly-minted card holder Viktor Hovland wasn’t fully aware of the rule when asked on Wednesday, though once informed he wasn’t worried about it, saying, “You take care of business, that shouldn’t matter. Just got to play better.”
Two-time major champion Bubba Watson expressed a different concern about the new cut rule. In Watson’s mind, the Tour is trying to fix something that isn’t broken with the new rule, while ignoring the real problem.
“If it’s about speeding up play, we’re not worried about speeding up play on the weekend,” Watson argued. “We’re worried about speeding up play the first two days… the weekend is not broke. It’s the weekdays that are broke.”
Australian pro Marc Leishman argued mostly in favor of the new cut rule, especially if it succeeds in reducing MDFs.
“Hopefully it doesn’t affect me, but I think it’s not a bad thing to take away from the MDF,” Leishman said, arguing that it’s unfair when someone makes the cut but then has a bad round on Saturday and isn’t allowed to improve on Sunday. “You might only have to make an extra five points and be the difference between keeping your job and losing it.”
But Leishman’s response reveals one problem with the new rule that could cause a lot of consternation over the course of the season. While players may say the new rule is fair if everyone is aware of it going into the week, their answer might change if they find themselves finishing between 66-70 regularly and heading home without a paycheck.
Europe and U.S. tied at 8-8 heading into final day of Solheim Cup
(Reuters) – The U.S. team fought back in the fourballs on Saturday to level the scores at 8-8 heading into the final day of the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles.
Three of the four fourball matches were decided on the final hole while Americans Danielle Kang and Lizette Salas beat Carlota Ciganda and Azahara Munoz with a birdie on the 17th to go two up.
Gusty conditions with winds clocked at over 50 kph made it difficult for both teams to get going and players also received warnings for slow play.
“It was a tough day, a battle for everyone,” Europe’s captain Catriona Matthew said.
“But the first two days has shown how close both teams are. Sunday will come down to the odd shot that will get momentum going one way or the other.”
The match between Europe’s Jodi Ewart Shadoff and Caroline Masson and Americans Lexi Thompson Marina Alex finished all square after both teams won three holes each to halve the points.
Americans Brittany Altomare and Annie Park and Europe’s Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier won their respective matches to ensure both teams were level heading into Sunday’s singles matches where 12 points are up for grabs.
“It was just back and forth the whole day,” Park said. “Both teams played some great golf in these conditions.
“It was tough out there. I’m so glad I played the Scottish Open. It was like this, maybe even worse. But I’m glad that I got that practice out.”
Earlier, Europe held a slender one-point advantage over the U.S. with a 6-1/2 to 5-1/2 lead after the foursomes saw the teams share two wins each.
The American Korda sisters, Jessica and Nelly, picked up where they left off on Friday at the PGA Centenary Course with a dominant 6 & 5 victory over Ciganda and Bronte Law.
Struggling Bronte and Law failed to sink a single birdie as the Americans claimed a point to level the overall score.
Europe, who were leading 4-1/2 to 3-1/2 after Friday’s fourballs, then had Charley Hull and Azahara Munoz to thank for their 4 & 3 victory over Danielle Kang and Megan Khang.
They were also boosted by Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier whose 3 & 2 victory over Lizette Salas and Ally McDonald at the 16th hole gave them two points.
But Americans Morgan Pressel and Marina Alex, who trailed Anna Nordqvist and Anne Van Dam by four after six holes, stunned the Europeans by taking seven of the next nine for a 2 & 1 victory.
Defending champions U.S. need 14 points to retain the Solheim Cup while Europe must score 14-1/2 to win the title for the first time since 2013.
Europe, US tied at 8-8 after brutal Day 2 at Solheim Cup
(Steve Douglas, September 14, 2019)
GLENEAGLES, Scotland (AP) — After a day of extraordinary comebacks, tense 18th-hole finishes, and some of the most brutal weather conditions in Solheim Cup history, still nothing can separate Europe and the United States at Gleneagles.
It’s 8-8 heading to the final-day singles and there’s no way of knowing which way this one’s going to fall.
It was just gone 7 p.m. local time on Saturday when Danielle Kang rolled in a long birdie putt amid the gloom to clinch the last match of the afternoon fourballs for the U.S. on the 17th hole, depriving the Europeans of the lead.
Kang hugged playing partner Lizette Salas, who was wearing giant ear muffs and a thick coat. They were congratulated by U.S. captain Juli Inskster, who was wearing three hats. Golf carts parked around the green had their headlights on.
It was one of those days when balls fell off tees and police officers roaming the course were seen holding onto their hats.
“I’m sure they’d love to be playing in Spain right now,” Inkster said of the players, “but this is where we’re at.”
It is the first time since 2011 in Ireland that Europe and the U.S. were tied going to the singles. The Europeans went on to lift the cup that year, and they are seeking to prevent a U.S. three-peat in women’s golf’s premier team event.
After the morning foursomes were shared 2-2, leaving Europe with a 6 1/2-5 1/2 lead, Inkster made the bold decision to rest the three unbeaten players in her team for the fourballs. Out went the Korda sisters, who had just swept to a record-tying 6-and-5 win, and also Morgan Pressel, who won seven of nine holes with Marina Alex to come from 4 down and secure a 2-and-1 victory.
Inkster went out of her “pod” system that has guided her selection and put her faith in fresher players to bring home the points in winds that reached 44 mph (70 kph).
The U.S. won the fourballs 2 1/2-1 1/2, with the match involving Kang and Salas — 2-up winners against Carlota Ciganda and Azahara Munoz — the only one not reaching the 18th hole.
Brittany Altomare and Annie Park had a 1-up victory in the top match over Anne van Dam and Suzann Pettersen, who left a putt short from 15 feet at the last that would have earned Europe a half-point.
Caroline Masson saw a curling putt from 8 feet lip out on No. 18 as her and European teammate Jodi Ewart Shadoff settled for a half-point against Alex and Lexi Thompson, the world No. 3 who still hasn’t won a match this week.
Then in the third match, Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier won the last five holes to recover from 3 down and claim a 2-up victory for Europe against Ally McDonald and Angel Yin. Hall and Boutier have played together in three matches and won all of them.
“The weather was horrendous — could hardly stand up,” said Hall, last year’s Women’s British Open champion. “Back nine, we kind of switched on and played some really good golf.”
Slow play has been another feature and each of the matches in the fourballs took more than 5 1/2 hours. Ciganda and Salas were both warned for bad times by the referee and every match was put on the clock.
“We’re playing for our country and we’re playing in these kind of conditions, so we’re playing as fast as we can,” said Thompson, who said the weather was “definitely the toughest I think I’ve played in.”
“We don’t want to be out there for six hours, either. But we have a lot on the line.”
Indeed, what’s at stake for the Americans is a third straight win — the third time they would have achieved such a streak — and an 11-5 lead in the overall series. It would be a stunning feat for a team containing a record six rookies and also for Inkster, who would become the first U.S. captain to have three victories.
Inkster said her players will put on some music — “I’ve got from Motown to Sam Smith to Khalid to Bruno Mars to the Temptations,” she said — and “chill out” rather than give any kind of motivational speech.
As for Europe captain Catriona Matthew, she believes Sunday can go either way.
“The first two days you can tell there’s not too much to pick between the two teams,” she said, “so we’re going in with a lot of confidence that we can do it.”
Annie Park, left, and Brittany Altomare of the US celebrate on the 18th green after finishing 1 up against Europe during the Fourballs match on Saturday.
Annie Park of the US celebrates with Brittany Altomare after holing a putt on the 9th hole during the Fourballs match
Anne Van Dam of Europe reacts after missing a putt on the 10th during the Fourballs match
Jessica and Nelly Korda, right, of the U.S celebrate after winning 6 & 5 in the Foursomes
Morgan Pressel, right, and Marina Alex of the U.S celebrate after winning the 12th hole during their Foursomes
Anne Van Dam of Europe reacts after missing a putt on the 9th green during the foursomes on Saturday.
Anne Van Dam of Europe and Suzann Pettersen line up their putt on the 15th green during the Fourballs
Europe retain one-shot Solheim Cup lead after foursomes
(Reuters) – Team Europe continued to hold a slender one-point advantage over the U.S. with a 6-1/2 to 5-1/2 lead after the second day’s foursomes in the Solheim Cup saw the teams share two wins each in gusty conditions at Gleneagles.
The American Korda sisters, Jessica and Nelly, picked up where they left off on Friday at the PGA Centenary Course with a dominant 6 & 5 victory over Carlota Ciganda and Bronte Law.
Struggling Bronte and Law failed to sink a single birdie as the Americans claimed a point to level the overall score.
Europe, who were leading 4-1/2 to 3-1/2 after Friday’s fourballs, then had Charley Hull and Azahara Munoz to thank for their 4 & 3 victory over Danielle Kang and Megan Khang.
They were also boosted by Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier whose 3 & 2 victory over Lizette Salas and Ally McDonald at the 16th hole gave them two points.
But Americans Morgan Pressel and Marina Alex, who trailed Anna Nordqvist and Anne Van Dam by four after six holes, stunned the Europeans by taking seven of the next nine for a 2 & 1 victory.
The U.S. need 14 points to retain the Solheim Cup while Europe must score 14-1/2 to win the title for the first time since 2013.
Solheim Cup: Korda sisters deliver again for US in foursomes
(Steve Douglas, September 14, 2019)
GLENEAGLES, Scotland (AP) — The dream team was reunited and the Korda sisters delivered again for the United States in a record-tying win at the Solheim Cup.
The performance of Morgan Pressel and Marina Alex was just as impressive Saturday.
The U.S. team kept in touch with Europe by sharing the morning foursomes 2-2 on a blustery Day 2 at Gleneagles, leaving the score at 6 1/2-5 ½ to the Europeans.
Some familiar faces brought home the points for the Americans.
Jessica and Nelly Korda — the first sisters to play together at a Solheim Cup — won in another blowout, beating Carlota Ciganda and Bronte Law 6 and 5 to tie the record for the heaviest margin of victory in foursomes. It followed up a 6-and-4 win in the same alternate-shot format on Friday before they were split up for the fourballs.
“She’s my best friend. So she knows me so well. She knows how to push my buttons and she knows how to calm me down, too,” said Nelly Korda, at 21 the younger of the sisters by five years. “She did a lot of that today, (the) calming down part, not pushing my buttons.
“But it was a good team effort today, which we needed because it was a tough day out there.”
Pressel, playing in her sixth Solheim Cup, and Alex, one of six U.S. rookies this year, lost four holes from Nos. 2-6 against Anna Nordqvist and Anne van Dam before launching an astonishing fightback in winds that reached speeds of 32 mph (51 kph) on the PGA Centenary Course.
The Americans won seven of the next nine holes, eventually securing a 2-and-1 victory.
“That’s what match play is all about. That’s how this event, the emotions can change at the drop of a hat,” Pressel said. “And once the momentum shifted toward us, we rode it the whole way back.”
Europe won the other two matches through pairings yet to lose this week.
Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier won in foursomes for the second time this week, beating Lizette Salas and Ally McDonald 3 and 2. Salas stood out Saturday morning by wearing giant, thick earmuffs to accompany the hand-warmer around her waist.
Charley Hull and Azahara Munoz defeated Danielle Kang and Megan Khang, 4 and 3, and have 2 1/2 points from three matches.
The fourballs are still to come Saturday, before the singles on Sunday.
___
Fourballs pairings (European team first):
Suzann Pettersen and Anne van Dam vs. Brittany Altomare and Annie Park (1140 GMT, 7:40 a.m. ET)
Jodi Ewart Shadoff and Caroline Masson vs. Lexi Thompson and Marina Alex (1155 GMT, 7:55 a.m. ET)
Georgia Hall and Celine Boutier vs. Ally McDonald and Angel Yin (1210 GMT, 8:10 a.m. ET)
Carlota Ciganda and Azahara Munoz vs. Lizette Salas and Danielle Kang (1225 GMT, 8:25 a.m. ET)
Jessica and Nelly Korda, right, of the U.S celebrate after winning 6 & 5 in the Foursomes match against Europe in the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Scotland, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019.
Morgan Pressel, right, and Marina Alex of the U.S celebrate after winning the 12th hole during their Foursomes match against Europe in the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Scotland, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019.
Anne Van Dam of Europe reacts after missing a putt on the 9th green during the Foursomes match against the U.S in the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Scotland, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019.
A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier: Third round pairings, tee times
(golf.com, September 13, 2019)
It’s a battle at the top of the first PGA Tour tournament of the 2019-20 season. Joaquin Niemann, Scottie Scheffler, and Robby Shelton are all tied at 13 under, each looking for their first Tour victory.
Niemann is the only one of the three who has completed a full season on the PGA Tour, earning his Tour card through sponsor’s exemption starts in 2018. Shelton and Scheffler each recently graduated from the Korn Ferry Tour and are playing for greater Tour priority ranking with a victory this weekend. A win during this early stretch of the season earns full status for the rest of this season (another 40-plus events) and the ensuing two seasons to follow.
Three shots back is Kevin Chappell, who shot a 59 Friday that featured nine-straight birdies, tying a PGA Tour record. Chappell is playing his first Tour event since microdisectomy surgery last fall.
Check out the full list of third round tee times below.
Third Round tee times — A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier
8:45 AM (9:45 PM KST)
Tyler McCumber (-4, 124th, $46,000)
Beau Hossler (83rd, $645,000)
8:55 AM
David Hearn (155th, $397,000)
Scott Brown (127th, $999,000)
9:05 AM
Sung Kang (144th, $2,801,000)
Bud Cauley (96th, $1,090,000)
9:15 AM
Russell Henley (100th, $1,133,000)
Johnson Wagner (170th, $597,000)
9:25 AM
Sebastian Cappelen (202nd, $0)
Jonathan Byrd (OWGR: 425, $550,547, 151st)
9:35 AM
Rhein Gibson (209th, $0)
Dominic Bozzelli (166th, $668,000)
9:45 AM
Viktor Hovland (56th, $678,000)
Doug Ghim (135th, $243,000)
9:55 AM
J.J. Spaun (153rd, $1,205,000)
Peter Uihlein (180th, $842,000)
10:05 AM
Bubba Watson (40th, $1,558,000)
Danny Lee (85th, $1,524,000)
10:15 AM
Brice Garnett (161st, $1,019,000)…$15,996,000
Brendan Steele (150th, $515,000)
10:25 AM
Andrew Novak (-5, Korn Ferry Tour $80,279, 62nd)
Doc Redman (-4, 92nd, $1,003,000)
10:35 AM
Keegan Bradley (-5, 41st, $1,902,000)
Roberto Castro (-5, 194th, $674,000)
10:45 AM
Sebastián Muñoz (-5, 143rd, OWGR: 201, $946,666, 117th)
Nick Taylor (-5, 139th, $892,000)
10:55 AM
Vince Covello (-6, 215th, $0)
Cameron Tringale (-5, 145th, $1,049,000)
11:05 AM
Joseph Bramlett (-6, 154th, $0)
Hank Lebioda (-6, 169th, $0)
11:15 AM
Matt Jones (152nd, $1,024,000)
D.J. Trahan (175th, $507,000)
11:25 AM
Scott Piercy (40th, $2,679,000)
Austin Cook (98th, $837,000)
11:35 AM
Mark Anderson (193rd, $0)
Peter Malnati (158th, $864,000)
11:45 AM
Martin Laird (119th, $863,000)
Cameron Percy (213rd, $0)
11:55 AM
Patrick Rodgers (82nd, $1,046,000)
Byeong Hun An (48th, $1,990,000)…$15,231,000
12:05 PM
Joel Dahmen (61st, $949,000)
Kevin Na (45th, $2,257,000)
12:15 PM
Mark Hubbard (-6, 187th, $0)
Robert Streb (-6, 111th, $796,000)
12:25 PM
Scott Harrington (-7, 206th, $0)
Harry Higgs (-7, 188th, $0)
12:35 PM
Jason Dufner (142nd, $926,000)
Denny McCarthy (101st, $925,000)
12:45 PM
Rob Oppenheim (208th, $0)
Tom Hoge (134th, $573,000)
12:55 PM
Bronson Burgoon (136th, $814,000)
Zack Sucher (148th, $753,000)
1:05 PM
Sungjae Im (-7, 28th, $2,851,000)
Grayson Murray (-7, 81st, $125,000)
1:15 PM
Lanto Griffin (-8, 164th, $0)
Richy Werenski (-8, 157th, $851,000)
1:25 PM
Brian Harman (-9, 53rd, $1,342,000)…$14,208,000
Nate Lashley (-8, 133rd, $2,030,000)
1:35 PM
Harris English (-9, 172nd, $628,000)
Harold Varner III (-9, 120th, $1,553,000)
1:45 PM
Cameron Smith (-9, 38th, $1,504,000)
Morgan Hoffmann (-9, 231st, $92,000)
1:55 PM
Kevin Chappell (-10, 59th, $257,000)
Sam Ryder (-9, 115th, $1,060,000)
2:05 PM
Robby Shelton (-13, 84th, $0)
Adam Long (-12, 182nd, $1,648,000)
2:15 PM (3:15 AM KST)
Scottie Scheffler (-13, 57th, $139,000)
Joaquin Niemann (-13, 33th, $1,434,000)…$10,335,000
Here’s why the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year ballot omitted Brooks Koepka’s historic major run
(golf.com, Josh Berhow, September 13, 2019)
Rory McIlroy won the Jack Nicklaus Award for the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year on Wednesday, but it didn’t come without a heated debate over who was most deserving of the honor.
McIlroy beat out fellow nominees Brooks Koepka, Matt Kuchar and Xander Schauffele, but it was essentially a two-horse race between McIlroy and Koepka, both of whom won three times on Tour last season. McIlroy himself said he was “somewhat surprised” when Nicklaus broke the news to him that he’d won.
The heightened interest around this year’s results raised at least a couple of questions about the Player of the Year balloting, namely how many players participated in the voting and what information was dispensed on the ballot.
In a phone interview with GOLF.com, Laura Neal, the Tour’s senior vice president of communications, did not say how many players voted in 2019 but she did say that in any given year 45 to 60 percent of players participate. The Tour also provided GOLF.com with a copy of the ballot, which you can read here:
The ballot summarizes each candidate’s season with four boilerplate statistics: number of tournaments entered, wins, top-10 finishes and FedEx Cup rank. Notably absent are the players’ results in the majors, including any mention of Koepka’s historic 2019 run (he finished in the top-4 in all four majors, a feat that has been matched only by Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth). Neal explained that the Tour intentionally omits any records or historic achievements from the summaries so as to avoid any appearance of “editorializing or influencing the process.” (For this same reason the ballot did not call out, for example, that McIlroy became the first player in history to win the Players Championship and FedEx Cup.) This means it’s beholden upon the voters to be informed as to what the POY candidates achieved over the past season beyond the four basic statistics that are provided.
Neal said the ballot is delivered electronically to eligible voters — players who have played in at least 15 events. The completed ballots go directly to the Tour’s accounting firm, Grant Thornton. Employees there tabulate the votes without Tour supervision and send the results to the Tour. The process is broadly similar to how Academy Award votes are tabulated.
“Feel free to debate whether the PGA Tour membership should have voted Rory or Brooks as Player of the Year,” Neal wrote in an email Friday. “What’s not up for debate is the Tour’s integrity — in this process or otherwise.”
Koepka won the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black; he also finished solo second at the U.S. Open, tied for second at the Masters and tied for fourth at the Open Championship. McIlroy’s 2019 resume was highlighted by his win at the Players Championship and Tour Championship, where he also claimed the FedEx Cup crown. He had five more top 10s than Koepka. But McIlroy was mostly a non-factor in the majors. He tied for 21st at the Masters, tied for 8th at the PGA, tied for 9th at the U.S. Open and missed the cut at the Open Championship.
It’s the third time McIlroy has won the Tour’s Player of the Year award, and the first since 2014, when he won three times and took home two major titles. He was asked on Wednesday if he would rather have a season like he did last year or one like he did in 2014.
“Look, every year’s different,” he said. “I’ve already had a year like 2014. I might have a year like that again. You know, I’m happier with my game, put it that way. I’m happier with where my game is now. I feel like I’m a better player now than I was in 2014, and that gives me a lot going forward.”
McIlroy’s Tour Championship victory last month bolstered his Player of the Year resume, but he admitted on Wednesday he was well aware he was going up against Koepka’s major title.
“I thought maybe Brooks winning the PGA Championship this year was going to be the difference-maker,” he said. “But you know, the other players thought differently, and I’m very honored that they thought enough of my season to give me this award.”
In naming Rory McIlroy Player of the Year, Tour players shunned history for money
(golf.com, Michael Bamberger, September 12, 2019)
“All politics are local,” a great Irish-American, the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, used to say. It means, among other things, if you take care of the people in your backyard, they will take care of you.
And that’s what happened this week when the lodge brothers evidently voted another great Irish-American, Rory McIlroy, as the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year. The winner was announced, but the vote tallies were not. And you thought you lived in a democracy!
Through their vote, the Tour players were sending a message to their biggest sponsors, the good people who back their two biggest events, the Players Championship and the FedEx Cup. Rory, you know, won both.
Did Brooks Koepka have a better wraparound golf year, as most ordinary fans would define better? Yes, without question — if your starting point is a romantic and historic attachment to golf’s four majors. Koepka’s elegant 2019 results line for the Big Four is already in the history books: a stroke behind Tiger at the Masters; a decisive win at the PGA Championship; a second-place finish at the U.S. Open, a fourth-place finish at the British Open. Even if he had not played in another event all year, that’s some year.
But the Tour players, in voting for McIlroy over Koepka, were shunning history in favor of money. That’s their prerogative. They are professional golfers, after all. “Show me the money” works as well for them as it does for anybody else, if not better. “Follow the money” does, too, when trying to figure out their motivations.
Rory McIlroy hits a tee shot during the 2019 Tour Championship. McIlroy won at East Lake and also claimed the $15 million bonus.
The two biggest paydays on the Tour schedule are two Sundays owned by the PGA Tour: the final day of the Players Championship and the final day of the FedEx Cup. McIlroy earned $2.25 million at the former and $15 million at the latter.
What kind of message would the players be sending if they didn’t put their stamp on all that?
There’s one other factor at work, and that’s the popularity contest. Both players are (I imagine) well-liked by their peers, and, in their candor, both are interesting. But when Koepka downplays every other event except the majors, and diminishes the traditional role of The Long Warmup in his Tour routine, he becomes a challenging figure to the players. And the players are creatures of habit. They don’t like their methods to be challenged.
Interestingly, the PGA of America Player of the Year Award, based on a formula anybody can read about, did go to Koepka. (Points for victories as a starting point, but a player earns three times as many points for a major as he does for a regular Tour event.) The PGA’s tally — actually announced! — was 84 points for Koepka and 78 for McIlroy, who got 20 points for his Players win. That’s making a nod to the historic importance of the majors.
You can be sure (or nearly sure) that the Golf Writers Association of America’s Player of the Year Award will go to Koepka, because the writers have a natural connection to, and affinity for, the majors. They’re in our blood, in part because some of us are lucky enough to go to them. In our valuing of them, we are actually, and appropriately, taking our lead from Tiger Woods, from Tom Watson, from Jack Nicklaus, from Arnold Palmer, from Ben Hogan, from Bobby Jones. We’re not in this for the money. The holy number clinging to Big Jack — 18! — really has nothing to do with money.
And there was Jack on Wednesday, handing a shocked Rory McIlroy the Jack Nicklaus Award for being the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year at a casual lunch. That part was both odd and cool.
My own take on these matters is this: Whose year would you most want to have? Brooks would say Brooks. Rory would say Brooks.
By McIlroy’s own reckoning, Koepka had a better (wraparound) year, with two other wins, one in Korea, another in Memphis. In an interview with Golf Channel, the Northern Irishman who lives in South Florida said he distinguishes between a “great” year and a “historic” year. He had a great year. A historic year, he said, is one in which you win a major. Koepka had a historic year. Tiger, of course, did, too. McIlroy did not.
My own take on these matters is this: Whose year would you most want to have? That’s where my vote goes. Tiger would say Tiger; he wouldn’t trade his year for anybody else’s. He didn’t just win a major again, he won the Masters, the one that got this whole thing started for him. Brooks would say Brooks. Rory would say Brooks.
You could make an interesting case for Tiger. He wasn’t by any measure the most dominant player of the year, but he was the most impactful. Viewed that way, he is, if you want to use the language in a literal way, the player of the year. Yes, that would be a fanciful vote and choice, but I think you can defend it more than you can a vote that values money over everything else.
The Wednesday lunch was at the Bear’s Club, in Jupiter, Fla. McIlroy is a member there and Nicklaus founded the club. Nicklaus presented the award before the first iced-tea was poured. McIlroy seemed genuinely shocked. It would be hard to imagine him voting for anybody other than Koepka, based on his “great” versus “historic” definitions.
It’s also hard to imagine Koepka voting for anyone other than McIlroy. Last year, when Koepka did win, he told Dan Patrick, “I didn’t vote; I was too lazy. I could never vote for myself.” He said his vote last year would have gone to either Bryson DeChambeau or Dustin Johnson. That’s being at least half-funny. In 2018, he won the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. He had one of the most historic golf years ever.
By the way, these votes, when they are debated and discussed, that’s all part of the fun. In 2011, GOLF Magazine named Rory McIlroy its Player of the Year. Not just in the male, professional division, but over everybody, including Yani Tseng, who won the British Open, the LPGA Championship. She played the world and won five other times. You could argue she should have received the award and many did. That’s good! Debate is good. He also told Patrick that he would vote next year. That is, this year. But we know he wouldn’t vote for himself, as he said. So does that mean he voted for Rory? Was he the tiebreaker? Weird! Fun! Discuss amongst yourselves.
I was curious to see if there is any language in the Player of the Year ballot that would guide players on how to vote, like a judge giving instructions to a jury. There’s not, but it is worth noting that under Koepka’s accomplishments, there’s no mention of his four top-4 finishes in the majors. Here’s a copy of the ballot, which the Tour shared with GOLF.com:
PGA Tour spokesperson Laura Neal declined to say how many players voted this year but did say that in any given year participation ranges from 45 to 60 percent. Neal added that the Tour outsources the vote tabulation. She explained that all eligible voters — players who have played in at least 15 events — receive electronic ballots. The completed ballots go directly to the Tour’s accounting firm, Grant Thornton. Employees there tabulate the votes without Tour supervision and send the results to the Tour. The process is broadly similar to how Academy Award votes are tabulated.
In any event, Rory McIlroy is your PGA Tour Player of the Year. Tremendous person, who had a great and consistent season, earning himself a boatload of money. The lodge brothers, in their voting, revealed the value they hold dearest. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you should know it.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Rory McIlroy beat Brooks Koepka at the Tour Championship, and he also topped Koepka in the Player of the Year race.
Should Rory McIlroy have won Player of the Year over Brooks Koepka? Let’s break down the numbers
(golf.com, Josh Berhow, September 12, 2019)
While the 2018-19 PGA Tour Player of the Year race was basically between two people — Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka — most believed it was Koepka out in front. Yet when it was announced on Wednesday that McIlroy won (Jack Nicklaus broke the news to him), many couldn’t believe he actually leap-frogged Koepka.
This award, however, is voted on by the players, and most apparently thought McIlroy’s campaign was better, regardless of which direction public opinion swayed. But with an award like this there are many variables that must be considered. Is it a popularity contest? How much emphasis should be put on majors? The Players? The fall season? The Playoffs? Tops 10s? You get the picture. Koepka may have topped McIlroy’s season when it comes to the majors (which aren’t run by the Tour), but McIlroy won both of the Tour’s marquee events, the Players and FedEx Cup Playoffs.
“Brooks has had an incredible year, an incredible two, three years, whatever it is,” McIlroy said on Wednesday. “He’s the No. 1 player in the world, and I don’t know, I think this speaks volumes of what PGA Tour players feel is important. I think players don’t just feel that four weeks a year is important. It’s more than that. We play a lot more. Why do we play 25 times a year if only four weeks are important? I think that’s a huge vote of confidence from the players that we play for more than just, you know, maybe what the narrative suggests.”
So who should have won Player of the Year? It’s time for you to vote. Check out the comparisons of both players and decide for yourself.
2018-19 wins
Rory McIlroy : Players Championship, Canadian Open, Tour Championship/FedEx Cup Playoffs
Brooks Koepka : The CJ Cup, PGA Championship, WGC-St. Jude Invitational
2018-19 top 10s
Rory McIlroy : 14 in 19 starts
Brooks Koepka : 9 in 21 starts
Major performance
Rory McIlroy :
Masters: T-21st
PGA Championship: T-8th
U.S. Open: T-9th
Open Championship: Cut
Brooks Koepka :
Masters: T-2nd
PGA Championship: Won
U.S. Open: 2nd
Open Championship: T-4th
WGC performance
Rory McIlroy :
WGC-HSBC: T-54th
WGC-Mexico: 2nd
WGC-Match Play: T-9th
WGC-St. Jude: T-4th
Brooks Koepka :
WGC-HSBC: T-16th
WGC-Mexico: T-27th
WGC-Match Play: T-56th
WGC-St. Jude: Won
PGA Tour marquee events
Rory McIlroy :
Players Championship: Won
Northern Trust: T-6th
BMW Championship: T-19th
Tour Championship/FedEx Cup Playoffs: Won
Brooks Koepka :
Players Championship: T-56h
Northern Trust: T-30th
BMW Championship: T-24th
Tour Championship/FedEx Cup Playoffs: T-3rd
Other notable events
Rory McIlroy :
ToC: T-4th
Arnold Palmer Invite: T-6th
The Memorial: Cut
Brooks Koepka :
ToC: 24th
Arnold Palmer Invite: Cut
The Memorial: DNP
2019-19 money earned
Rory McIlroy: $22,785,286
Brooks Koepka: $13,184,006
*Includes FedEx Cup bonus money
World ranking
Rory McIlroy :
Beginning of 2018-19 season: 6th
End of 2018-19 season: 2nd
Brooks Koepka :
Beginning of 2018-19 season: 3rd
End of 2018-19 season: 1st
Strokes-gained statistics
Rory McIlroy :
SG off the tee: 1st
SG approach the green: 12th
SG around the green: 19th
SG putting: 24th
SG tee to green: 1st
SG total: 1st
Brooks Koepka :
SG off the tee: 21st
SG approach the green: 11th
SG around the green: 92nd
SG putting: 48th
SG tee to green: 12th
SG total: 9th
* Not all events track Strokes Gained statistics.
And there you have it. Case closed? Well, that depends on whom you are talking to. During his conference call on Wednesday, McIlroy was asked if he was told how close the vote was.
“I inquired,” he said, “and they are keeping tight-lipped on that.”
Perhaps we’ll never know.
Neanderthal Footprints Found in France Offer Clues to Group Behavior
The 80,000-year-old prints fill in gaps left by fossils and artifacts.
(NYT, Knvul Sheikh, Sept. 12, 2019)
A group of Neanderthal children scampered around the Normandy coast in France 80,000 years ago. Their footprints quickly became covered by windblown sand, preserved as ghostly signs of their passage.
The tracks were eventually discovered by archaeologists working at a site called Le Rozel on the country’s northwestern shore. Carefully brushing away layers of sand, the scientists found 257 footprints between 2012 and 2017. The team described the collection in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Evidence from Neanderthal fossils and artifacts discovered across Europe and Asia has slowly painted a picture of the culturally and socially complex lives of our closest extinct human relatives. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Neanderthals were not backward cave men. Scientists have found artifacts that suggest they crafted stone tools, made cave art and carried out various rituals, such as burying their dead.
But a few fossils and isolated artifacts don’t tell the whole story.
“It is really difficult to study the composition and size of Neanderthal groups from skeletal remains and stone tools,” said Jeremy Duveau, a graduate student in paleoanthropology at the French National Museum of Natural History, who led the new study.
In the past, researchers have only been able to guess at the sizes of Neanderthal groups. Assumptions were based on observations of modern human hunter-gatherers, the size of the structures that Neanderthals built for shelter or the number of individuals buried at a particular site. But these methods were all indirect and often hotly contested among archaeologists.
The Le Rozel footprints could help provide a more accurate picture of Neanderthals’ group sizes and social lives.
The excavation site of the footprint layer in Le Rozel.
Mr. Duveau and his colleagues estimated that the Le Rozel tracks had been created by 10 to 13 individuals, who likely occupied the site between autumn and spring of some years. Analyzing the size and shape of the footprints confirmed that they were consistent with what scientists know of Neanderthals’ broader foot structure: slightly wider, with a lower arch than the footprints of typical Homo sapiens.
Based on the size of the footprints, the researchers were also able to calculate the heights of the footprint makers. To their surprise, most of the individuals were under four feet tall, indicating they were children and adolescents. (Average Neanderthal adults are thought to have been around 5-foot-6.) Children outnumbered adults by at least 4 to 1, and the smallest print seemed to belong to a two-year-old.
“The reason this finding is surprising is that the number of kids is slightly out of line from what modern hunting and gathering communities are like,” said William Parkinson, the curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He added that groups of modern hunter-gatherers typically contain more adults than children.
The number of children in the Le Rozel group also stands out from the handful of Neanderthal burial sites that scientists have found around the world. At the El Sidron cave in Spain and the Krapina archaeological site in Croatia, scientists have found remains of Neanderthal groups that consisted of more adults than children.
“This could speak to variability in Neanderthal groups,” Dr. Parkinson said. “Maybe what we’re looking at is differential practices in who gets buried in specific sites, and those sites don’t represent actual group composition.”
The Le Rozel prints also raise new ideas about Neanderthals’ social lives. Perhaps adult Neanderthals left their children with chaperones while they went off to hunt or work nearby. Or perhaps the adults died young, Mr. Duveau said.
The footprints make Le Rozel a very important site: People can look at the Le Rozel footprints and picture young Neanderthals scampering around a beach several thousand years ago.
“It’s the first time that we can talk about how big a group is in a moment when they were walking around,” Dr. Parkinson said. “It sort of brings to life the past.”
Sites with Neanderthal footprints are extremely rare. Scientists have found just nine other Neanderthal footprints around the world, in Gibraltar, Greece, Romania and France.
But researchers have continued to uncover hundreds more footprints at Le Rozel. And scattered among the tracks are also eight handprints, remains of stone tools and signs of a butchery.
Mr. Duveau and his team have painstakingly photographed and created 3D models of each of their findings. They also made casts of the prints and removed some for better preservation.
A small set of the casts are currently on display at the International Center of Prehistory in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, France, and at the Canadian Museum of History. Most of the rest are kept in an archive managed by France’s Ministry of Culture, where researchers hope further studies will reveal more about Neanderthals’ behavior and group mobility.
A Neanderthal footprint found at an archeological site in Le Rozel, France.
Neanderthals Were People, Too
New research shows they shared many behaviors that we long believed to be uniquely human. Why did science get them so wrong?
(NYT, Jon Mooallem, Jan. 11, 2017)
Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and work. There was no room in his worldview for randomness, only purpose and praise. “See how God this rolling globe/swathes with beauty as a robe,” one of his verses goes. “Forests, fields, and living things/each its Master’s glory sings.” He wrote dozens of hymns like this — awe-struck and simple-minded. Then he caught tuberculosis and died at 30.
Almost two centuries later, in the summer of 1856, workers quarrying limestone in that valley dug up an unusual skull. It was elongated and almost chinless, and the fossilized bones found alongside it were extra thick and fit together oddly. This was three years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species.” The science of human origins was not a science; the assumption was that our ancestors had always looked like us, all the way back to Adam. (Even distinguishing fossils from ordinary rock was beyond the grasp of many scientists. One popular method involved licking them; if the material had animal matter in it, it stuck to your tongue.) And so, as anomalous as these German bones seemed, most scholars had no trouble finding satisfying explanations. A leading theory held that this was the skeleton of a lost, bowlegged Cossack with rickets. The peculiar bony ridge over the man’s eyes was a result of the poor Cossack’s perpetually furrowing his brow in pain — because of the rickets.
One British geologist, William King, suspected something more radical. Instead of being the remains of an atypical human, they might have belonged to a typical member of an alternate humanity. In 1864, he published a paper introducing it as such — an extinct human species, the first ever discovered. King named this species after the valley where it was found, which itself had been named for the ecstatic poet who once wandered it. He called it Homo neanderthalensis: Neanderthal Man.
Who was Neanderthal Man? King felt obligated to describe him. But with no established techniques for interpreting archaeological material like the skull, he fell back on racism and phrenology. He focused on the peculiarities of the Neanderthal’s skull, including the “enormously projecting brow.” No living humans had skeletal features remotely like these, but King was under the impression that the skulls of contemporary African and Australian aboriginals resembled the Neanderthals’ more than “ordinary” white-people skulls. So extrapolating from his low opinion of what he called these “savage” races, he explained that the Neanderthal’s skull alone was proof of its moral “darkness” and stupidity. “The thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute,” he wrote. Other scientists piled on. So did the popular press. We knew almost nothing about Neanderthals, but already we assumed they were ogres and losers.
The genesis of this idea, the historian Paige Madison notes, largely comes down to flukes of “timing and luck.” While King was working, another British scientist, George Busk, had the same suspicions about the Neander skull. He had received a comparable one, too, from the tiny British territory of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar skull was dug up long before the Neander Valley specimen surfaced, but local hobbyists simply labeled it “human skull” and forgot about it for the next 16 years. Its brow ridge wasn’t as prominent as the Neander skull’s, and its features were less imposing; it was a woman’s skull, it turns out. Busk dashed off a quick report but stopped short of naming the new creature. He hoped to study additional fossils and learn more. Privately, he considered calling it Homo calpicus, or Gibraltar Man.
So, what if Busk — “a conscientious naturalist too cautious to make premature claims,” as Madison describes him — had beaten King to publication? Consider how different our first impressions of a Gibraltar Woman might have been from those of Neanderthal Man: what feelings of sympathy, or even kinship, this other skull might have stirred.
There is a worldview, the opposite of Joachim Neander’s, that sees our planet as a product of only tumult and indifference. In such a world, it’s possible for an entire species to be ground into extinction by forces beyond its control and then, 40,000 years later, be dug up and made to endure an additional century and a half of bad luck and abuse.
That’s what happened to the Neanderthals. And it’s what we did to them. But recently, after we’d snickered over their skulls for so long, it stopped being clear who the boneheads were.
I’ll start with a confession, an embarrassing but relevant one, because I would come to see our history with Neanderthals as continually distorted by an unfortunate human tendency to believe in ideas that are, in reality, incorrect — and then to leverage that conviction into a feeling of superiority over other people. And in retrospect, I realize I demonstrated that same tendency myself at the beginning of this project. Because I don’t want to come off as self-righteous, or as pointing fingers, here goes:
Before traveling to Gibraltar last summer, I had no idea what Gibraltar was. Or rather, I was sure I knew what Gibraltar was, but I was wrong. I thought it was just that famous Rock — an unpopulated hunk of free-floating geology, which, if I’m being honest, I recognized mostly from the Prudential logo: that limestone protuberance at the mouth of the Mediterranean, that elephantine white molar jutting into the sky. True, I was traveling to Gibraltar on short notice; when I cold-called the director of the Gibraltar Museum, Clive Finlayson, he told me the museum happened to be starting its annual excavation of a Neanderthal cave there the following week and invited me to join. Still, even a couple of days before I left, when a friend told me she faintly remembered spending an afternoon in Gibraltar once as a teenager, I gently mansplained to her that I was pretty sure she was mistaken: Gibraltar, I told her, wasn’t somewhere you could just go. In my mind, I had privileged access. I pictured myself and Finlayson taking a special little boat.
In fact, Gibraltar is a peninsula connected to Spain. It’s a lively British overseas territory, with 30,000 citizens living in a city on its western side — a city with bakeries and clothing stores and tourists buying all the usual kitsch. Some unusual kitsch, too — like a laminated child’s place mat I spotted that, in a typical tourist destination, might say something unexceptional like SOMEONE WHO LOVES ME WENT TO GIBRALTAR, but here read WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER! BRITISH FOREVER!
The history of Gibraltar, given its strategic location, is a grinding saga of military sieges and ruthlessly contested changes in ownership. The residue of that strife, today, is a pronounced British patriotism and a never-ending exchange of slights with Spain, which still disputes Britain’s claim to the territory. After Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, in 2012, when Gibraltar projected towering images of Her Majesty on a Spain-facing side of the Rock — “a clear act of provocation,” one reporter called it — Spain began inspecting vehicle after vehicle at the border, backing up the line for hours, stranding the bulk of Gibraltar’s work force, who commute in every day. The afternoon I showed up, activists from a far-right Spanish political party had crossed into Gibraltar and hung an enormous Spanish flag high up on the Rock. This wasn’t just mischief. It was regarded as an act of symbolic terrorism. When one of the men appeared in court two days later, I read, a woman screamed at him, “Gibraltar will never be Spanish!” She sounded like that defiant place mat come to life.
I happened to arrive in Gibraltar the week of the Brexit vote. Up in England, people were thundering about the working class versus elites, sovereignty and immigration, warning that British identity was being fouled by the European project. But in Gibraltar — a far-flung, fully detached nib of Britain, flanked by water on two sides and Spain on the third — the question was less philosophical: If the United Kingdom left the European Union, Spain might seize the opportunity to isolate Gibraltar, leaving the territory to shrivel up, like a flap of dead skin. The Gibraltarian government had already called on the House of Commons for help. There was concern that Spain would jam up the border again and that it might happen right away.
Around town, “Remain” signs hung everywhere. The atmosphere was edgy, as though everyone was holding hands, waiting to see whether a meteor would hit. It was like the hairline cracks between so many self-designated Us-es and Thems seemed to be widening, and some corrosive, molten goop was seeping out: mutual dependence curdled with contempt. Clearly it was happening back home in America too.
All in all, it was a good week to spend in a cave.
Gorham’s Cave is on Gibraltar’s rough-hewed eastern coast: a tremendous opening at the bottom of the sheer face of the Rock, shadowy and hallowed-seeming, like a cathedral. Its mouth is 200 feet across at the base and 120 feet tall. It tapers asymmetrically like a crumpled wizard’s hat.
Neanderthals inhabited Gorham’s Cave on and off for 100,000 years, as well as a second cave next to it, called Vanguard Cave. The artifacts they left behind were buried as wind pushed sand into the cave. This created a high sloping dune, composed of hundreds of distinct layers of sand, each of which was once the surface of the dune, the floor of the cave. The dune is enormous. It reaches about two-thirds of the way up Gorham’s walls, spilling out of the cave’s mouth and onto the rocky beach, like a colossal cat’s tongue lapping at the Mediterranean. Every summer, since 1989, a team of archaeologists has returned to meticulously clear that sand away and recover the material inside. “I realized a long time ago, I won’t live to see the end of this project,” Finlayson, who leads the excavation, told me. “But I think we’re in a great moment. We’re beginning to understand these people after a century of putting them down as apelike brutes.”
Neanderthals are people, too — a separate, shorn-off branch of our family tree. We last shared an ancestor at some point between 500,000 and 750,000 years ago. Then our evolutionary trajectory split. We evolved in Africa, while the Neanderthals would live in Europe and Asia for 300,000 years. Or as little as 60,000 years. It depends whom you ask. It always does: The study of human origins, I found, is riddled with vehement disagreements and scientists who readily dismantle the premises of even the most straightforward-seeming questions. (In this case, the uncertainty rests, in part, on when, in this long evolutionary process, Neanderthals officially became “Neanderthals.”) What is clearer is that roughly 40,000 years ago, just as our own lineage expanded from Africa and took over Eurasia, the Neanderthals disappeared. Scientists have always assumed that the timing wasn’t coincidental. Maybe we used our superior intellects to outcompete the Neanderthals for resources; maybe we clubbed them all to death. Whatever the mechanism of this so-called replacement, it seemed to imply that our kind was somehow better than their kind. We’re still here, after all, and their path ended as soon as we crossed paths.
But Neanderthals weren’t the slow-witted louts we’ve imagined them to be — not just a bunch of Neanderthals. As a review of findings published last year put it, they were actually “very similar” to their contemporary Homo sapiens in Africa, in terms of “standard markers of modern cognitive and behavioral capacities.” We’ve always classified Neanderthals, technically, as human — part of the genus Homo. But it turns out they also did the stuff that, you know, makes us human.
Neanderthals buried their dead. They made jewelry and specialized tools. They made ocher and other pigments, perhaps to paint their faces or bodies — evidence of a “symbolically mediated worldview,” as archaeologists call it. Their tracheal anatomy suggests that they were capable of language and probably had high-pitched, raspy voices, like Julia Child. They manufactured glue from birch bark, which required heating the bark to at least 644 degrees Fahrenheit — a feat scientists find difficult to duplicate without a ceramic container. In Gibraltar, there’s evidence that Neanderthals extracted the feathers of certain birds — only dark feathers — possibly for aesthetic or ceremonial purposes. And while Neanderthals were once presumed to be crude scavengers, we now know they exploited the different terrains on which they lived. They took down dangerous game, including an extinct species of rhinoceros. Some ate seals and other marine mammals. Some ate shellfish. Some ate chamomile. (They had regional cuisines.) They used toothpicks.
Wearing feathers, eating seals — maybe none of this sounds particularly impressive. But it’s what our human ancestors were capable of back then too, and scientists have always considered such behavioral flexibility and complexity as signs of our specialness. When it came to Neanderthals, though, many researchers literally couldn’t see the evidence sitting in front of them. A lot of the new thinking about Neanderthals comes from revisiting material in museum collections, excavated decades ago, and re-examining it with new technology or simply with open minds. The real surprise of these discoveries may not be the competence of Neanderthals but how obnoxiously low our expectations for them have been — the bias with which too many scientists approached that other Us. One archaeologist called these researchers “modern human supremacists.”
Inside Gorham’s Cave, archaeologists were excavating what they called a hearth — not a physical fireplace but a spot in the sand where, around 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals lit a fire. Each summer, the Gibraltar Museum employs students from universities in England and Spain to work the dig, and now two young women — one from each country — sat cross-legged under work lights, clearing sand away with the edge of a trowel and a brush to leave a free-standing cube. A black band of charcoal ran through it.
The students worked scrupulously, watching for small animal bones or artifacts. They’d pulled out a butchered ibex mandible, a number of mollusk shells and pine-nut husks. They’d also found six chunks of fossilized hyena dung, as well as “débitage,” distinctive shards of flint left over when Neanderthals shattered larger pieces to make axes.
The cube of sand would eventually be wrapped in plaster and sent for analysis. The sand the two women were sweeping into their dustpans was transferred into plastic bags and marched out of the cave, down to the beach, where other students sieved it. Smaller bones caught in the sieve were bagged and labeled. Even the sand that passed through the sieve was saved and driven back to a lab at the museum, where I would later find three other students picking through it with magnifying glasses and tweezers, searching for tinier stuff — rodent teeth, sea-urchin spines — while listening to “Call Me Maybe.”
To an outsider, it looked preposterous. The archaeologists were cataloging and storing absolutely everything, treating this physical material as though it were digital information — JPEGs of itself. And yet they couldn’t afford not to: Everything a Neanderthal came into contact with was a valuable clue. (In 28 years of excavations here, archaeologists have yet to find a fossil of an actual Neanderthal.) “This is like putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle where you only have five pieces,” Finlayson said. He somehow made this analogy sound exciting instead of hopeless.
By that point, the enormousness of what they didn’t know — what they could never know — had become a distraction for me. One of the dig’s lead archaeologists, Richard Jennings of Liverpool John Moores University, listed the many items they had found around that hearth. “And this is literally just from two squares!” he said. (A “square,” in archaeology, is one meter by one meter; sites are divided into grids of squares.) Then Jennings waved wordlessly at the rest of the sand-filled cave. Look at the big picture, he was saying; imagine what else we’ll find! There was also Vanguard Cave next door, an even more promising site, because while Gorham’s had been partly excavated by less meticulous scientists in the 1940s and ’50s, Finlayson’s team was the first to touch Vanguard. Already they had uncovered a layer of perfectly preserved mud there. (“We suspect, if there’s a place where you’re going to find the first Neanderthal footprint, it will be here,” Finlayson said.) The “resolution” of the caves was incredible; the wind blew sand in so fast that it preserved short periods, faithfully, like entries in a diary. Finlayson has described it as “the longest and most detailed record of [Neanderthals’] way of life that is currently available.”
The openings to Gibraltar caves, including Gorham’s and Vanguard
This was the good news. And yet there were more than 20 other nearby caves that the Gibraltar Neanderthals might have used, and they were now underwater, behind us. When sea levels rose around 20,000 years ago, the Mediterranean drowned them. It also drowned the wooded savanna between Gorham’s and the former coastline — where, presumably, the Neanderthals had spent an even larger share of their lives and left even more artifacts.
So yes, Jennings was right: There was a lot of cave left to dig through. But it was like looking for needles in a haystack, and the entire haystack was merely the one needle they had managed to find in an astronomically larger haystack. And most of that haystack was now inaccessible forever. I could tell it wasn’t productive to dwell on the problem at this scale, while picking pine-nut husks from the hearth, but there it was.
“Look, you can almost see what’s happening,” Finlayson eventually said. “The fire and the charcoal, the embers scattering.” It was true. If you followed that stratum of sand away from the hearth, you could see, embedded in the wall behind us, black flecks where the smoke and cinders from this fire had blown. Suddenly, it struck me — though it should have earlier — that what we were looking at were the remnants of a single event: a specific fire, on a specific night, made by specific Neanderthals. Maybe this won’t sound that profound, but it snapped that prehistoric abstraction into focus. This wasn’t just a “hearth,” I realized; it was a campfire.
Finlayson began narrating the scene for me. A few Neanderthals cooked the ibex they had hunted and the mussels and nuts they had foraged and then, after dinner, made some tools around the fire. After they went to sleep and the fire died out, a hyena slinked in to scavenge scraps from the ashes and took a poop. Then — perhaps that same night — the wind picked up and covered everything with the fine layer of sand that these students were now brushing away.
While we stood talking, one of the women uncovered a small flint ax, called a Levallois flake. After 50,000 years, the edge was still sharp. They let me touch it.
One of the earliest authorities on Neanderthals was a Frenchman named Marcellin Boule. A lot of what he said was wrong.
In 1911, Boule began publishing his analysis of the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton ever discovered, which he named Old Man of La Chapelle, after the limestone cave where it was found. Laboring to reconstruct the Old Man’s anatomy, he deduced that its head must have been slouched forward, its spine hunched and its toes spread like an ape’s. Then, having reassembled the Neanderthal this way, Boule insulted it. This “brutish” and “clumsy” posture, he wrote, clearly indicated a lack of morals and a lifestyle dominated by “functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind.” A colleague of Boule’s went further, claiming that Neanderthals usually walked on all fours and never laughed: “Man-ape had no smile.” Boule was part of a movement trying to reconcile natural selection with religion; by portraying Neanderthals as closer to animals than to us, he could protect the ideal of a separate, immaculate human lineage. When he consulted with an artist to make a rendering of the Neanderthal, it came out looking like a furry, mean gorilla.
Neanderthal fossils kept surfacing in Europe, and scholars like Boule were scrambling to make sense of them, improvising what would later grow into a new interdisciplinary field, now known as paleoanthropology. The evolution of that science was haphazard and often comically unscientific. An exhaustive history by Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman describes how Neanderthals became “mirrors that reflected, in all their awfulness and awesomeness, the nature and humanity of those who touched them.” That included a lot of human blundering. It became clear only in 1957, for example — 46 years after Boule, and after several re-examinations of the Old Man’s skeleton — that Boule’s particular Neanderthal, which led him to imagine all Neanderthals as stooped-over oafs, actually just had several deforming injuries and severe osteoarthritis.
Still, Boule’s influence was long-lasting. Over the years, his ideologically tainted image of Neanderthals was often refracted through the lens of other ideologies, occasionally racist ones. In 1930, the prominent British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, writing in The New York Times, channeled Boule’s work to justify colonialism. For Keith, the replacement of an ancient, inferior species like Neanderthals by newer, heartier Homo sapiens proved that Britain’s actions in Australia — “The white man … replacing the most ancient type of brown man known to us” — was part of a natural order that had been operating for millenniums.
It’s easy to get snooty about all this unenlightened paleoanthropology of the past. But all sciences operate by trying to fit new data into existing theories. And this particular science, for which the “data” has always consisted of scant and somewhat inscrutable bits of rock and fossil, often has to lean on those meta-narratives even more heavily. “Assumptions, theories, expectations,” the University of Barcelona archaeologist João Zilhão says, “all must come into play a lot, because you are interpreting data that do not speak for themselves.”
Imagine, for example, working in a cave without any skulls or other easily distinguishable fossils and trying to figure out if you’re looking at a Neanderthal settlement or a more recent, modern human one. In the past, scientists might turn to the surrounding artifacts, interpreting more primitive-looking tools as evidence of Neanderthals and more advanced-looking tools as evidence of early modern humans. But working that way, it’s easy to miss evidence of Neanderthals’ resemblance to us, because, as soon as you see it, you assume they were us. So many techniques similarly hinge on interpretation and judgment, even perfectly empirical-sounding ones, like “morphometric analysis” — identifying fossils as belonging to one species rather than another by comparing particular parts of their anatomy — and radiocarbon dating. How the material to be dated is sampled and how results are calibrated are susceptible to drastic revision and bitter disagreement. (What’s more, because of an infuriating quirk of physics, the effectiveness of radiocarbon dating happens to break down around 40,000 years ago — right around the time of the Neanderthal extinction. One of our best tools for looking into the past becomes unreliable at exactly the moment we’re most interested in examining.)
Ultimately, a bottomless relativism can creep in: tenuous interpretations held up by webs of other interpretations, each strung from still more interpretations. Almost every archaeologist I interviewed complained that the field has become “overinterpreted” — that the ratio of physical evidence to speculation about that evidence is out of whack. Good stories can generate their own momentum.
Adrie (left) and Alfons Kennis with a figure they made for the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany
Starting in the 1920s, older and more exciting hominid fossils, like Homo erectus, began surfacing in Africa and Asia, and the field soon shifted its focus there. The Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, who began his career in the early ’70s, told me, “When I started working on Neanderthals, nobody really cared about them.” The liveliest question about Neanderthals was still the first one: Were they our direct ancestors or the endpoint of a separate evolutionary track? Scientists called this question “the Neanderthal Problem.” Some of the theories worked up to answer it encouraged different visions of Neanderthal intelligence and behavior. The “Multiregional Model,” for example, which had us descending from Neanderthals, was more inclined to see them as capable, sympathetic and fundamentally human; the opposing “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which held that we moved in and replaced them, cast them as comparatively inferior.
For decades, when evidence of a more advanced Neanderthal way of life turned up, it was often explained away, or mobbed by enough contrary or undermining interpretations that, over time, it never found real purchase. Some findings broke through more than others, however, like the discovery of what was essentially a small Neanderthal cemetery, in Shanidar Cave, in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. There had been many compelling instances of Neanderthals’ burying their dead, but Shanidar was harder to ignore, especially after soil samples revealed the presence of huge amounts of pollen. This was interpreted as the remains of a funerary floral arrangement. An archaeologist at the center of this work, Ralph Solecki, published a book called “Shanidar: The First Flower People.” It was 1971 — the Age of Aquarius. Those flowers, he’d go on to write, proved that Neanderthals “had ‘soul.’ ”
Then again, Solecki’s idea was eventually discredited. In 1999, a more thorough analysis of the Shanidar grave site found that Neanderthals almost certainly did not leave flowers there. The pollen had been tracked in, thousands of years later, by burrowing, gerbil-like rodents. (That said, even a half-century later, there are still paleoanthropologists at work on this question. It might not have been gerbils; it may have been bees.)
As more supposed anomalies surfaced, they became harder to brush off. In 1996, the paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and others used CT scanning technology to re-examine a bone fragment found in a French cave decades earlier, alongside a raft of advanced tools and artifacts, associated with the so-called Châtelperronian industry, which archaeologists always presumed was the work of early modern humans. Now Hublin’s analysis identified the bone as belonging to a Neanderthal. But rather than reascribe the Châtelperronian industry to Neanderthals, Hublin chalked up his findings to “acculturation”: Surely the Neanderthals must have learned how to make this stuff by watching us.
“To me,” says Zilhão, the University of Barcelona archaeologist, “there was a logical shock: If the paradigm forces you to say something like this, there must be something wrong with the paradigm.” Zilhão published a stinging critique challenging the field to shake off its “anti-Neanderthal prejudice.” Papers were fired back and forth, igniting what Zilhão calls “a 20-year war” and counting. Then, in the middle of that war, geneticists shook up the paradigm completely.
A group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led by Svante Paabo, had been assembling a draft sequence of a Neanderthal genome, using DNA recovered from bones. Their findings were published in 2010. It had already become clear by then that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals appeared in Eurasia separately — “Out of Africa was essentially right” — but Paabo’s work revealed that before the Neanderthals disappeared, the two groups mated. Even today, 40,000 years after our gene pools stopped mixing, most living humans still carry Neanderthal DNA, making up roughly 1 to 2 percent of our total genomes. The data shows that we also apparently bred with other hominids, like the Denisovans, about which very little is known.
It was staggering; even Paabo couldn’t bring himself to believe it at first. But the results were the results, and they carried a sort of empirical magnetism that archaeological evidence lacks. “Geneticists are much more powerful, numerous and incomparably better funded than anyone else dealing with this stuff,” Zilhão said. He joked: “Their aura is kind of miraculous. It’s a bit like receiving the Ten Commandments from God.” Paabo’s work, and a continuing wave of genomic research, has provided clarity but also complexity, recasting our oppositional, zero-sum relationship into something more communal and collaborative — and perhaps not just on the genetic level. The extent of the interbreeding supported previous speculation, by a minority of paleoanthropologists, that there might have been cases of Neanderthals and modern humans living alongside each other, intermeshed, for centuries, and that generations of their offspring had found places in those communities, too. Then again, it’s also possible that some of the interbreeding was forced.
Paabo now recommends against imagining separate species of human evolution altogether: not an Us and a Them, but one enormous “metapopulation” composed of shifting clusters of essentially human-ish things that periodically coincided in time and space and, when they happened to bump into one another, occasionally had sex.
Lunch happened at the mouth of Gorham’s Cave, out in the sun. I ate a sandwich on a log, facing the sea, alongside Jennings and a few of his Liverpool students, while the young men and women from Spain mingled behind us, laughing and stretching and helping one another crack their backs. The language barrier seemed to discourage the two cohorts from talking much. And yet the students lived together during the excavation and had somehow achieved a muffled camaraderie.
Even Jennings and his counterpart, José María Gutiérrez López, a veteran archaeologist from a museum in Cádiz, had a somewhat similar dynamic, despite working closely together for many summers at Gorham’s. Neither was terribly fluent in the other’s language, but their silence, by this point, seemed warm and knowing. Waiting for our ride at the end of one workday, I noticed them staring at a plastic bag snagged in the concertina wire above an old military gate. The bag had been there for a long, long time, Jennings told me. Then he turned and uttered, “Cinco años?” Gutiérrez López smiled. “Sí,” he said, nodding.
I, meanwhile, felt compelled to test out all of this as a model for human-Neanderthal relations. That contact obsessed me: What would it have been like to look out over a grassy plain and watch parallel humanity pass by? Scientists often turn to historical first contacts as frames of reference, like the arrival of Europeans among Native Americans, or Captain Cook landing in Australia — largely histories of violence and subjugation. But as Zilhão points out, typically one of those two cultures set out to conquer the other. “Those people were conscious that they’d come from somewhere else,” he told me. “They were a product of a civilization that had books, that had studied their past.” Homo sapiens encountering Neanderthals would have been different: They met uncoupled from politics and history; neither identified as part of a network of millions of supposedly more advanced people. And so, as Finlayson put it to me: “Each valley could have told a different story. In one, they may have hit each other over the head. In another, they may have made love. In another, they ignored each other.”
It’s a kind of coexistence that our modern imaginations may no longer be sensitive enough to envision. So much of our identity as a species is tied up in our anomalousness, in our dominion over others. But that narcissistic self-image is an exceedingly recent privilege. (“Outside the world of Tolkienesque fantasy literature, we tend to think that it is normal for there to be just one human species on Earth at a time,” the writers Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse explain. “The past 20 or 30 millennia, however, have been the exception.”) Now, eating lunch, I considered that the co-occurrence of humans and Neanderthals hadn’t been so trippy or profound after all. Maybe it looked as mundane as this: two groups, lingering on a beach, only sort of acknowledging each other. Maybe the many millenniums during which we shared Eurasia was, much of the time, like a superlong elevator ride with strangers.
Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum
Some paleoanthropologists are starting to reimagine the extinction of Neanderthals as equally prosaic: not the culmination of some epic clash of civilizations but an aggregate result of a long, ecological muddle. Strictly speaking, extinction is what happens after a species fails to maintain a higher proportion of births to deaths — it’s a numbers game. And so the real competition between Neanderthals and early modern humans wasn’t localized quarrels for food or territory but a quiet, millenniums-long demographic marathon: each species repopulating itself, until one fell so far behind that it vanished. And we had a big head start. “When modern humans came,” notes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum, “there just weren’t that many Neanderthals around.”
For millenniums, some scientists believe, before modern humans poured in from Africa, the climate in Europe was exceptionally unstable. The landscape kept flipping between temperate forest and cold, treeless steppe. The fauna that Neanderthals subsisted on kept migrating away, faster than they could. Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill an N.F.L. stadium.”) With the demographics so skewed, Stringer went on, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow modern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals. And yet Stringer is careful not to conflate innovation with superior intelligence. Innovation, too, can be a function of population size. “We live in an age where information, where good ideas, spread like wildfire, and we build on them,” Stringer told me. “But it wasn’t like that 50,000 years ago.” The more members your species has, the more likely one member will stumble on a useful new technology — and that, once stumbl
TOUR Insider: As the Asian market expands, so does its talent level
Davis Love III has won events in China, Japan, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Australia. In his three decades as a professional his career has taken him all over the world.
This week he added a new stamp to his passport: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“I was lucky enough to have dinner with the deputy prime minister (Tuesday) night, and he was shocked that it was my first trip here, and so, at 50 years old, now I can start my world travels, I guess,” Love said. “The last 10 years I’ve really been focused on our TOUR, staying home, basically only have played the British Open is the only real trip I’ve made. Now family and business will allow me to expand my horizons a little bit.”
CIMB CLASSIC: Tee times | Inside the Field | Power Rankings | Expert Picks | Complete coverage
There’s almost not a week on the calendar when there’s not a tournament being played in some corner of the world. Have clubs, will travel. If a player wants a game, he can find one.
Golf is more global than ever, and that includes on the PGA TOUR, which will have stops in China and Mexico in the coming weeks.
“I don’t think anybody could have dreamt the PGA TOUR would be playing events outside of America and certainly in places like Malaysia and China 20 years ago,” said Lee Westwood. “The golf courses have improved dramatically. The purses have improved dramatically. “
So have the players, and not just in this country.
Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama, South Korea’s Seung-Yul Noh and Sang-Moon Bae, are all recent winners on TOUR.
David Lipsky could be next.
Born in L.A. to a Jewish father and Korean mother, Lipsky, who was an All-American while at Northwestern, won in Cambodia in 2012 and last month on the European Tour in Switzerland.
Earlier this year, he came in second at the Championship at Laguna National, a co-sanctioned Asian and European Tour event in Singapore and a few years ago finished third at Kuala Lumpur Golf & Country Club.
The 26-year-old also has a healthy lead in the Asian Tour’s Order of Merit, where he has earned just under $670,000 in 10 starts.
All the globetrotting is done with one thing in mind.
“Being from the United States, definitely, getting to the PGA TOUR at some point is one of my goals,” Lipsky said. “I’ve been progressing every year with my game and developing everything, so hopefully the next couple years, I’ll be able to take that next step and play the PGA TOUR.”
Lipsky of course isn’t alone. Others have taken different paths with similar success.
Brooks Koepka and Peter Uihlein, both heralded American players coming out of college, took their game to a more global stage once they turned professional.
It worked. Koepka won four times on the European Challenge Tour. In two events on the PGA TOUR this season, he’s tied for eighth and fourth.
Uihlein has one career win on the Challenge Tour and another on the European Tour.
As for golf in Asia, like most everywhere else in the world it continues to grow. It also provides another place for a player to develop his game and a path eventually to bigger things.
“I think that all sort of snowballed, and the PGA TOUR and people like that realize that there’s an emerging market,” said Westwood. “It’s a great place to come and play.”
And one that continues to produce talent. Matsuyama, Noh and Bae are just the latest examples.
“You can see that the awareness level is much higher than it was maybe 15, 20 years ago, so it’s nice to see that obviously all the Asians are getting into the game a lot more, and you start to see a lot more Asian players playing on both the PGA TOUR and the European Tour,” said Sergio Garcia, also in the field for this week’s CIMB Classic. “It’s a great market to grow and to bring up, and hopefully we’ll be able to keep our level up, because in some years, it might take over.”
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사람들이 주제에 대해 자주 검색하는 키워드 Breakdown of Joaquin Niemann’s golf swing
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