From Eupedia, modern humans likely inerited light skin and hair colours from continous interbreeding with Neanderthals:
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.shtml
This also applies to behaviour, immunity to diseases and according to some scientists, the shape of modern European skull and brain.
So considering that Neanderthal DNA is still influencing the genes of modern humans in the above ways, modern Europeans are nothing but NEANDERTHAL HYBRIDS! Asians also interbred with Denisovan.
Neanderthal looking just like a modern European, his descendants:
You seem to have missed most of the scientific papers on that topic in the last years. Humans DID INHERIT genes related to behavior (of course a tiny proportion of all the genes associated with human behavior), as well as to skin and hair color, but NOT JUST those that are associated with loss of pigmentation, but also some of those associated with heavier pigmentation (darker color). Besides, and most importantly, NONE OF THOSE gene variants were among the most relevant and impactful gene alleles that caused light skin, light hair and other traits in modern humans. None. Therefore the modern phenotype of humans was NOT heavily influenced by Neanderthals, but they had a very very minor contribution, indeed.
Well, if you think that Neanderthal man looks exactly like a modern European, I'm afraid all you're loking at is the hair and skin color. He does not look like average Europeans at all, and that's pretty obvious and visible. Besides, all those "Neanderthals" out there are preconceived reconstructions made by artists. The latest findings of DNA studies have clearly established that Neanderthals probably had a range of skin, hair and eye colors roughly like modern Eurasians also do. Therefore, there were very probably black-haired, darker-skinned Neanderthals, too, but the reconstructions are clearly based on the assumption that, because they were very northern hominins, then they must all have looked white and blonde. But even if they were, well, that's exactly a classic case of convergent evolution, especially because we ALREADY KNOW that the looks-related genes Eurasians inherited from them were not that significant to us moderners. If blonde hair, blue eye or very light skin had indeed come from Neanderthals, we'd also expect East Asians to have much more of those traits, because it is in East Asians that we actually find the highest proportion of Neanderthal ancestry.
I find it kind of ludicrous that some Europeans are talking so much about this "Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans".
It's not "in Europeans". It's in non-Africans as a whole, and Europeans aren't even those with more archaic human admixture, not even Neanderthal-specific ancestry. East Asians, Central Asians, Native Americans, Middle Easterners, South Asians, all of them have partial, even if invariably tiny, Neanderthal ancestry, and yet we don't see many non-European people supposedly "looking just like Neanderthals". Europeans as a whole are NO OUTLIERS at all in that respect.
Like Angela, I find it a bit bizarre that, instead of merely acknowledging archaic hominin introgression in modern Europeans (actually in all modern humans, including Africans), people think it's reasonable to talk of Europeans as "AMH-Neanderthal hybrids" when the average Neanderthal contribution to the modern European genetic pool is, what?, around 1.5% (and, if anything, all non-Subsaharan-Africans would be such "hybrids", not just Europeans). So a 98.5% European man with 1.5% Subsaharan ancestry is "multiracial", or a white American with 1.5% Native American ancestry is maybe a "Native American hybrid"? I can't follow that reasoning...