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Neanderthals Like Us
by Karen Wright
Even today, features thought to be Neanderthal are as familiar as the portraits in a grandparent's home: the sloping forehead, the heavy brow, the stocky, big-boned physique... many Neanderthal features persist in European visages today: a unique hole in the jawbone, the shape of a suture in the cheek, a highly angled nose... Meanwhile, archaeologists are questioning their assumptions about the Neanderthal lifestyle. In particular, it has become less clear exactly who invented the Upper Paleolithic. One assemblage in France, dated between 39,000 and 34,000 years ago, has bone and shell pendants, carved teeth and beads, as well as finely worked tools like the Cro-Magnons used. But the only bones found with this technology are Neanderthal... [Ian] Tattersall says studies that use DNA from contemporary populations to reconstruct human genealogy support the idea of a single, small source of Homo sapiens... The mtDNA extracted from Neanderthal bones doesn't match anything in the modern world. But last year, when geneticists compared mtDNA from an early modern Australian with contemporary mtDNA, it didn't match either."

old links, probably expired, emphasis mine:

Fathers can be influential too
by Eleanor Lawrence
Biologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
Is Eve older than we thought?
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."

This one was on the NYTimes website, but was later in the (pay to view) archive there:

Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's Him

Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's Him
by Nicholas Wade
April 27, 2002
When scientists at Celera Genomics announced two years ago that they had decoded the human genome, they said the genetic data came from anonymous donors and presented it as a universal human map. But the scientist who led the effort, Dr. J. Craig Venter, now says that the genome decoded was largely his own. Dr. Venter also says that he started taking fat-lowering drugs after analyzing his genes... [M]embers of Celera's scientific advisory board expressed disappointment that Dr. Venter subverted the anonymous selection process that they had approved... Though the five individuals who contributed to Celera's genome are marked by separate codes, Dr. Venter's is recognizable as the largest contribution. He said he had inherited from one parent the variant gene known as apoE4, which is associated with abnormal fat metabolism and the risk of Alzheimer's, and that he was taking fat-lowering drugs to counteract its effects... Dr. Arthur Caplan, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous. It should be a map of all us, not of one, and I am disappointed if it is linked to a person."

Venter spent millions or billions of other people's money so he would know to take fat fighting meds. Other folks get fired for surfin' the web at work. Still others claim that the DNA from one person shows that we're all 99+ per cent genetically identical. Life is an absurd theater at times.

Neandertals had bigger braincases, so it may have been less likely that hybridization took place between Cro-Magnon females and Neandertal males. These were all home deliveries you know. Despite the cumulative influence of the father's mtDNA, the descendants of early hybrids are likely to have mostly their Neandertal mom's mtDNA. While some hybrids may have Cro-Magnon moms, these would be swamped by hybrids with Neandertal moms.