That “halfway between man and chimp” claim is complete BS, and appeared in just one — non-scientific — source, a tabloid in India.
It pays to keep up.
"Several lines of evidence indicate that the 65,250 base pairs of hominid sequence so far identified in the library are of Neanderthal origin, the strongest being the ascertainment of sequence identities between Neanderthal and chimpanzee at sites where the human genomic sequence is different...."