quote:
The result: The Neandertal DNA was substantially different from the DNA of modern humans. This was enough to rule out the possibility that they were our ancestors. Paablo concluded that his find suggests "that Neandertals were extinct without contributing mitochondrial DNA to modern humans."
You and Paabo are saying different things here. Of the two statements, Paabo's is the more limited, and the more correct. The mtDNA results show that Europeans did not inherit any mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals. That makes it quite unlikely that they made a major contribution to our genes, but it does not rule out the possibility that there was some Neanderthal contribution to European genes in other parts of the genome. Studies of nuclear loci confirm the view that most non-African genes had a recent African origin, but they do not offer a conclusive answer to the question of whether the contribution from non-African archaics was small or actually zero.
™ Version 4.2