Additionally. It would be very hard for a homo sapiens male to rape a neanderthal female, they are very thickset. Neanderthal males would have no problem in raping Homo sapien females though. And I would assume that the genetic variation between neanderthal groups would probably be much more pronounced than humans. The fact we have so little DNA from them means that analyzing their genes within modern human populations is very hard to do. How can we make assumptions based on vastly insufficient data?
It is not she's a romance writer that has informend herself well. But it's still fiction. Still there are actually a couple of articles out there on neanderthale speech (link)
I couldn't draw definitive conclusions, I am open to either option. But a lot more data is required to get closer to a plausible possibility.
I recently read in Discover magazine that a small percent of humans have small amounts of denisovan DNA. I could check the article for more info if your interested.
We are a smorgasbord of Great ape DNA, it is only natural. I am sure scientific discovery will continue to find this is more and more prevalent in our past and in fact many many great ape species lasted far longer than they thought. I don't think they've found specimens of all the Homo-species yet either.
