The Neandertal genome story is in the air. See The New York Times and Wired. Watch the press conference here.
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This is why they were fond of yogurt.
Would it even have occurred to them to try drinking cow's milk? The aurochs that modern cattle are descended from were very big and very aggressive. It took thousands of years of domestication to make them practical milk producers.
Correction: Neanderthal adults couldn't digest cow's milk.
Double Correction: 1 Neandertal adult couldn't digest lactose.
BBC: the Croatian Neanderthal fossils harboured an ancestral form of the microcephalin-1 gene, which today is also found among Africans.
Does this torpedo microcephalin re neandergression, or are there significant caveats? The major caveat I can think of is that the derived microcephalin allele, if it originated in neanders, might still have been rather infrequent and/or local in neanders during the millennia of contact/replacement. Hence, we might see it in a few neanders later on, once a higher number of them are sequenced.
Then there's the contamination issue, which has been discussed a bit in the pop media. Evidently contamination was assessed somehow and found to be low. I haven't pursued the technical details.
Since a large fraction of the genome apparently isn't in yet, that also leaves room for neandergression at loci other than microcephalin.
Cows couldn't digest neanderthal's milk
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(right back atcha)