John Hawks has a very long post up. This part caught my attention:
We don't really know the answers, but now we have a chance to test hypotheses about ancient population size and expansion in Neandertals. My point at the moment is only this: If today Neandertal genes make up only one percent of the gene pool of the 5 billion people outside Africa, that's the genetic equivalent of 50 million Neandertals.
As Hawks notes later, this paper comes pretty close to resolving whether Neandertals were of the same species as we moderns, at least using the biological species concept. There were fertile hybrids. That should not be too surprising, a few years ago when the Neandertal introgression story was big I looked into mammalian embryology, and our lineage had to be very special as mammals went for their to be inter-population sterility. This is not just a science story. ...
