NEANDERMAN WALKS THE EARTH!

Scientists with nothing better to do have been pondering an age-old question: Did humans ever mate with Neanderthals?

The answer should be obvious to anyone who happens to be in Pebble Beach this weekend, where the open spaces in the forest will become a domain for robust men with strong jaws who swing clubs and grunt the language of "golf."

DNA specialists have been trying to make the Neanderthal-human link in an effort to prove that the two carbon-based life forms may have cohabited more than 40,000 years ago. Anthropologists believe the results of their coupling are a subspecies of Neandermen who have evolved over the years into what most of us now refer to as golfers.

Research into Neanderthals started in earnest about 150 years ago, after quarrymen in the Neander Valley of Germany discovered the fossilized remains of Phil Harris, who eventually became a marginal celebrity of the 1940s and who showed up at virtually every Bing Crosby Pro-Am golf tournament at Pebble Beach to spill whiskey on the shoes of fellow golfers.

Anthropologists say the Bing Crosby Pro-Am was a sporting event that predates the time when golf tournaments became nothing but a big corporate yukfest. It was a simpler time, when watching rummy old men spill their drinks was considered high comedy.

But the links between yesteryear's crude Neanderthals and today's refined golfers are too similar to dispel as mere coincidence. Glen Campbell, after all, plays golf.

More important, the Joe Livernois Column earns high points this week for its skilled use of the word "links" in a column about golf. Perhaps, when the Joe Livernois Column evolves from its current Flintstonean existence, it might someday have the clever imagination necessary to link celebrity golfers with the title of a movie in which the celebrity once appeared.

Getting back to the main point, though, the similarities between golfers and Neanderthals are startling.

According to the anthropologists, Neanderthals were talented users of "tools," crafting spears, hammers, knives and Callaway Big Bertha obsidian drivers. Scientists also believe Neanderthals were the first beings on earth to place a firm grip on their putters.

The original Neanderthals roamed the landscape of Europe and the Middle East. Some anthropologists believe Neanderthals evolved from an even cruder life-form called "homo erectus," but those claims were recently challenged by Creationists who refuse to accept that any scientific term with the word "homo" in it can describe a natural phenomenon.

Scientists were excited last year by one of their more astounding discoveries: a man fitting the description of a purebred Neanderthal found in a spider hole in the country of Iraq. But their excitement turned to disappointment after the man insisted he despised the sport of golf.

The original tribes of Neanderthals are now extinct and anthropologists who care about such things are trying to figure out exactly what killed them off. To date, their most valid theories point to the fact that Neanderthals must have been a society of life-wasting sluggards in that they spent so much of their time playing golf.