[Regulator75]

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiol...rthal_dna.html

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.

The results from the new studies confirm the Neanderthal's humanity, and show that their genomes and ours are more than 99.5 percent identical, differing by only about 3 million bases.
"This is a drop in the bucket if you consider that the human genome is 3 billion bases," said Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led one of the research teams.

"Humans went through several stages of evolution in the last 400,000 years," said study co-author Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago. "If we can compare humans’ and Neanderthals’ genomes, then we can possibly identify what the key genetic changes were during that final stage of human evolution."
A completed genome will also reveal new insights about Neanderthals, who disappeared mysteriously about 30,000 years ago.
"In having the Neanderthal genome sequence ...we're going to learn about the biology, learn about things that we could never learn from the bones and the artifacts that we have," Rubin said.
The results of Rubin's team are detailed in the Nov. 16 issue of the journal Nature; Paabo's team's results are detailed in the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Science.