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o varmintman well knows the truth, and yet continues to post utter rubbish, beginning with his very first claim — that Neanderthal DNA is “half way between human and chimpanzee”.

Calling that one a lie makes YOU a liar:

http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19970712/19355423.html

He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee.

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/video/On_Trial.html

Timeline: 1997 isolated Neandertal DNA Neandertals are almost exactly halfway between the chimpanzee and modern humans

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020057

The retrieval of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from four Neandertal fossils from Germany, Russia, and Croatia has demonstrated that these individuals carried closely related mtDNAs that are not found among current humans.....

varmintman: "Calling that one a lie makes YOU a liar:"

Your sources from 1996 are way, way out of date.
So, how many times do you have to see the truth before you stop misrepresenting it?

"The nucleotide diversity between humans is estimated to be in the range of 0.1%, which is 1 difference per 1,000 base pairs[6] to 0.4%....
It is estimated that a total of 10 to 30 million SNPs exist in the human population of which at least 1% are functional (see International HapMap Project)."

In short, genetic diversity among humans is 10 million to 30 million DNA mutations.

"At roughly 3.2 billion base pairs,[3] the Neanderthal genome is about the size of the modern human genome.
According to preliminary sequences, 99.7% of the base pairs of the modern human and Neanderthal genomes are identical, compared to humans sharing around 98.8% of base pairs with the chimpanzee.[4]

(Other studies concerning the commonality between chimps and humans have modified the commonality of 98% to a commonality of only 94%, showing that the genetic gap between humans and chimps is far larger than originally thought.)"

In other words, the genetic difference between humans and neanderthals is about .3% or circa 10 million DNA mutations.
That means there is more genetic diversity among humans than between humans and Neanderthals.

Contrast the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees at 94% = 192 million DNA mutations or 19 times the differences between humans and Neanderthals.

So, on a scale of one to twenty, where chimpanzees are 20 and humans one, Neanderthals are about 1.5 at most.

Furthermore, the 1% to 4% of Neanderthal DNA in some humans tells us that either they interbred before Neanderthals' extinction, or share a more recent common ancestor than previously supposed.