Neanderthals interbred with non African populations

[Minimalist]

Why is this a big deal? Nothing major in the current conception of human evolution seem to depend on whether Neaderthals and humans ever interbred.

Its a big deal because for years the Out of Africa crowd has insisted that HNS was an evolutionary dead end and that there was no interbreeding between the two.

OOA doesn't depend on HNS being a dead end. It only depends on a small group of what is already HSS, or something so near as to make no different, coming out of africa being responsible for majority of the genetic heritage of all modern HSS outside of Africa. It hardly mattered if the african HSS picked up sea slug genes on the way to jeruselum so long as they didn't pick up a lot of it.

OOA said most of what makes HSS came from Africa, that's it.

If we didn't pick up any genes from outside Africa, that would be sufficient evidence to prove OOA. But that is not necessary evidence to prove OOA.

Well, I didn't devise the theory but recent discoveries will force it to move to your position. However this is the difference between science and religion. Religion would simply dismiss new evidence and burn unbelievers at the stake!

http://kozmopolitaydinlar.wordpress.com/...of-africa/

In contrast, the Out of Africa Model13 asserts that modern humans evolved relatively recently in Africa, migrated into Eurasia and replaced all populations which had descended from Homo erectus. Critical to this model are the following tenets:
Out of Africa theory: homo sapiens arose in Africa and migrated to other parts of the world to replace other hominid species, including homo erectus.

after Homo erectus migrated out of Africa the different populations became reproductively isolated, evolving independently, and in some cases like the Neanderthals, into separate species
Homo sapiens arose in one place, probably Africa (geographically this includes the Middle East)
Homo sapiens ultimately migrated out of Africa and replaced all other human populations, without interbreeding
modern human variation is a relatively recent phenomenon