On Mon, 19 Oct 1998 10:58:29 -0700, Ray Audette <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Todd Moody wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, Ray Audette wrote:
>>
>> > >From DNA samples we know that Neanderthal began this process many
>> > generations before it manifested a noticicable change in physiology
>> > resulting in Cro-Magnon.
>>
>> Since most of the scientific community apparently rejects the
>> view that the Cro-Magnons were descended from the Neanderthal,
>
>Rather, only a few anthropologists agree on anything....

Only a few?

Here i have collected a little information on the neanderthal dna-study,
and one on neanderthal anatomy.
May everybody make it's own suppositions if he or she is descending
from neanderthals or not.

enjoy

Amadeus

http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/dna.html
  The researchers focused on DNA from the mitochondria, organelles within cells, rather than from the nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA
is more abundant than nuclear DNA, and is thus more likely to be recovered in sufficient amounts to allow replication. In addition,
mitochondrial DNA is transmitted only from the mother so that changes from generation to generation result from mutation alone
rather than recombination of the mother and father's DNA. The scientists obtained a sequence of 379 amino acid base pairs by
replicating shorter, overlapping segments. They identified 27 differences between the Neandertal DNA and a modern reference
DNA sample over the replicated sequence. By contrast, DNA from a random sample of a modern population might vary from the
reference DNA in five to eight places.

   DNA dating is based on the assumption (debated by geneticists) that mutations occur at a constant rate. The accumulated mutations
in DNA can be measured, and the time necessary for them to occur calculated. The amount of difference between Neandertal and
human DNA suggests that our common ancestor existed about 550,000 to 690,000 years ago. Although this date must be qualified (it is
based on one specimen only, and the DNA clock may or may not be as accurate as we assume), it is in accord with the fossil record.
Osteological characteristics of the 300,000-year-old remains from the Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain (see "Faces from the
Past," ARCHAEOLOGY, May/June 1997) and the 400,000- to 500,000-year-old jaw from Mauer, Germany, indicate that these humans,
generally classified as Homo heidelbergensis, are ancestral to Neandertals. This suggests the split between the ancestors of modern
humans and Neandertals had occurred somewhat earlier, about the time indicated by the new DNA date.

... a study of temporal bones from Arcy-sur-Cure and other sites indicates
significant differences between Neandertals and modern humans, suggesting interbreeding did not occur (see "Neandertal News,"
ARCHAEOLOGY, September/October 1996).
 If Neandertals made a significant genetic contribution to modern humans, similarities should exist between DNA of Neandertals and
that of people from Europe, where the Neandertals persisted the longest. Pääbo and his colleagues compared the Neandertal DNA
to that from five modern populations, but it proved no closer to DNA from modern Europeans than to that from four other groups.
While this does not rule out the possibility of Neandertal and modern human mixing, it suggests that the Neandertal genetic
contribution to modern gene pools, if any, was small.

http://www.cee.umn.edu/dis/courses/HIST1011_4821_01.www/course/01.html
...... Discoveries of fossils of modern human
beings dated ninety-two thousand years back at the cave of Qafzeh, and sixty thousand years back at the cave of Kebara (both in
Israel), definitely disproving that modern human beings have descended from the Neanderthals.

http://www.gaialogic.org/gaianation/aat-neanderthal.html
The DNA test "clearly lends support to this idea about our ancestry: that we have all come out of Africa quite recently
in history,"....The findings were published in Cell, a journal based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and outlined Thursday at a news
conference in London. Paabo said his results were independently confirmed at Pennsylvania State University.

Besides DNA: one anatomical study:
http://usatoday.com/life/science/ancient/lsa005.htm
The new study of Neanderthal nasal passages in the Oct. 1 proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences will not settle the debate over human kinship, but
experts say it provides strong new evidence for Neanderthal's own branch on
the evolutionary tree.

Besides that I found a bunch of neanderthal links at:
   http://thunder.indstate.edu/~ramanank/links.html