Was there any significance to the point at which you truncated the ABC News article? Here's the last section, the only one that somehow didn't make it onto the thread in your post.
Just another piece of evidence on the pile that says our mtDNA isn't neanderthal. What's really needed is enough nuclear--not mitochondrial--DNA to do a good study.Debate Continues
Loring Brace, an anthropologist at University of Michigan and a proponent of the idea that people descended from Neanderthals — he argues that features of skulls show a steady progression from Neanderthal to human — says the DNA evidence does not sway him. Different patterns of movement may have caused mitochrondial DNA to diverge more quickly in the past, he says. “The whole picture is still very spotty,” Brace says.Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says the DNA evidence does not disprove his assertion that the 25,000-year-old skeleton of a child unearthed in Portugal is the descendent of a human-Neanderthal hybrid. The new research, he says, just shows interbreeding was not common.
“There is no contradiction,” he says.
Goodwin also says his finding isn’t the final word. Perhaps Neanderthals and humans mated and produced sterile offspring, similar to mules, the crossbreed of horses and donkeys. “It’s very hard to prove any negative,” Goodwin says. “I wouldn’t claim this to be conclusive.”
The neanderthal is still a piece of the puzzle even if it's an absolutely proven genetic dead end. If they're offline, they're not far offline. They would be very, very close relatives if they were still around.
No, the part I posted was the facts. The part I left out is just rhetoric and the opinion of someone who disregards the facts as he himself admits "the DNA evidence does not sway him". A scientist that willfully ignores the evidence is no scientist and his opinion is not worth anything.