How do they know that applies to all Neanderthals and not just the subset for whom they've found DNA?
I'm never really see the point of all this study of the origin of Humans. I figure at some point God put a soul in us and then we stopped being apes.
Sorry, but I’m not falling for any of this. God created Adam and Steve... beginning and end of story.
First God made democrats, He looked upon His work and thought “And now, DELUGE!”
You raised a good point in that early “man” is not Homo Sapiens by the biologists own terms, and frankly I’m not impressed with the “dating” of genetic sequences. The claim is made that the line leading to Homo Sapiens and the line leading to the Chimps diverged 7 to 7.5 millions years ago. The method used to reach that time period is really based on a number of weak assumptions such as the duration of a generation.