[mewzilla]

Jeez louise, it's just one skeleton. One. Personally, I'd want a larger sample size before jumping to any conclusions.

[mewzilla]

And I'd like to know the number of samples on the DNA testing. And did they test the one skeleton with human and Neanderthal features.

[twigs]

I'd want a larger sample size before jumping to any conclusions.

Agreed. I know people today with Neanderthal features, but it doesn't mean they have Neanderthal DNA (I assume).

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Personally, I would have thought that it should be obvious of the contributions of the Neanderthals to the gene pool from looking at Carville. Listening to him is another matter. More like listening to Foghorn Leghorn.

[Sentis]

I agree the Europeans are actively working to prove they aren't related to Neanderthal. Their Neanderthal DNA samples are notorious for being very small samples or even flawed DNA samples that have been contaminated. As an American Archaeologist I am very leery of anything an archaeologist in Europe states.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

One negative is sufficient to disprove an hypothesis. If you claim that all baseball bats are yellow, the occurence of even on red baseball bat disproves your assertion. [Excludes the trivial case where you use the trait as a defining characteristic, i.e, "If it's not yellow then it's not a baseball bat."]

[capitan_refugio]

If the DNA differences between the Neanderthal sample and the reference sample are significant, you may not need very many more to prove the point. Afterall, the DNA sequence diversion between humans and chimps is about 4.8% (R.J. Britton, 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). A geneticist would pick that up in one sample.

Admittedly, a larger sample would lend greater credibility to the finding.

[samuel_adams_us]

This could be proved easily by taking blood from Tom Dashole. Since he is a cross between Cro-Magnum and Neanderthal all of the DNA should match and it would also lead credibility to the idea that democrats are behind in evolution.

[CobaltBlue]

If you search google using

mitochondrial dna neanderthal

you'll turn up a bunch of studies. All coming to the same conclusion - no evidence of interbreeding between Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens.