[BroJoeK]

"Similarly, a human and a neanderthal may be some 99% or so identical in genetic DNA, that doesn't mean that one cannot find genetic evidence of neanderthal ancestry within some human populations by way of crossbreeding, and be able to estimate that human population as having 1 to 4% neanderthal ancestry.

Neanderthals are distinctly non human."

Your explanation here may well be correct, but that's not what the report says. And this is not the only place I've seen those numbers.

The report says:

"the researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not."

That is clearly bogus, and someone needs to send whoever wrote it back to remedial math class -- or maybe "scientific ethics" class.

[allmendream]

I think what they meant was that we share 1 to 4% of their otherwise unique genetic markers in our genetic DNA, indicating that European and Asian populations have about 1 to 4% neanderthal ancestry.

Useing the coyote-wolf example again, it would be like if you identified 100 uniquely wolf genetic markers, and some coyote populations had none of them, but other coyote populations had 1 to 4% of them. That would indicated that the second coyote population had 1 to 4% wolf ancestry.

The same techniques could be used to estimate the amount of “Moor” ancestry in your average Sicilian, or the amount of Amerindian ancestry in your average American of European descent.