Quote Originally Posted by jaden View Post
Further, it's well cited that the most genetically distant human groups, such as Northern Europeans and Sub Saharan Africans share 98.5-99% of base pairs, yet according to all the Neanderthal genomic data we have so far modern Euros and Neanderthal share 99.7% of base pairs... Anyone else starting to wonder about how this "disappearance" event could have actually consisted of?
These statistics sound wrong. Have sources?

Surely, all Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups present in modern Europeans are African Homo Sapiens in origin, rather than Neanderthal. That puts a limit on the amount of autosomal DNA Neanderthals could have introduced, especially considering that mtDNA in particular has a relatively low bottlenecking rate and little selection pressure. I don't discount the hypothesis that certain autosomal traits could have been introduced via Neanderthal interbreeding and then selected for, but the total autosomal input can't be nearly as high as you're suggesting.