I saw that from the NY Times today. Very interestingread indeed. One of the related links on this article points to the "Frankenstein" Neanderthal skeleton constructed by scientists that seems to contradict this finding. Or this finding contradicts that skeletal finding. Then again maybe not. It would be interesting if this article addressed the findings of the skeletal reconstruction.

Now what would be even more fascinating is this could advance to the point where we could use this for cloning. How cool would it be to live long enough to see the cloning of a dinosaur as well? I guess by now the hope of finding the right DNA (mitochondrial?) is no longer a possibility, but who knows.

>For those that believe in science.
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>"Humans and their close Neanderthal relatives began diverging from a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago, and the two groups split permanently some 300,000 years later, according to two of the most detailed analyses of Neanderthal DNA to date. Using different techniques, two teams of scientists separately sequenced large chunks of DNA extracted from the femur of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen found in a cave [image] 26 years ago in Croatia. One team sequenced more than one million base pairs and the other 65,000 pairs of the genome."
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>http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/061115_neanderthal_dna.html