Welcoming Neanderthals to the Family

There's a lot of buzz on the internet about recently published studies that confirm a neanderthal contribution to the modern human genome. In other words, the ancestors of modern humans mated with neanderthals. Most of the commentary is uninformed and I will not add to it, but I will refer you to a guy who is fully informed on the matter and can place the new studies in their proper context. He is John Hawks and he explains the importance of these studies here.