Neandertal genome open thread

My thoughts on the topic are pretty disjointed, and I can't come up with a post that adds anything to what others have already said. And there's still the primary documents to digest in full. So I'm going to open this post up to stray thoughts/comments (though try to keep it at least at the level of a Neandertal cognitively). Question: what other human evolution story is of the same order of magnitude in terms of significance? I think the last one of this magnitude was the Cann, et. al. "mitochondrial Eve" narrative of the mid-80s. Before that Lucy?