[MichiganMan]

Humans and neanderthals are unrelated. The neanderthal has been ruled out as a plausible ancestor for modern man simply and precisely because the genetic gulf is too wide and the genetic gap between us and anything preceeding the neanderthal would have been wider. There is precisely nothing on this planet which we could be descended from via anything resembling evolution.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to be under the impression that the article is saying that homo-sapiens descended from neandethals. 

Without addressing what appears to be your skeptisism in the theory of evolution, that's not what the article said.  Its saying (and this is the currently accepted view among evolution believers (of which I am one)) that homo-sapiens and neanderthals each diverged from a common line of ancensters, a third undetermined clasification of hominid, not one from the other. 

[MichiganMan]

skeptisism

Yep, that's me, spelling champ. sigh.

Anyways, reading over my post (which I obviously didn't do enough of before posting) I see that my statement regarding a third undetermined classification of hominid implies that there were no human species between the common ancestral species of homo-sapiens and neanderthals. I don't believe that has yet be determined one way or the other.

[wendy1946]

That’s not what I claimed. What I DID claim is that “too remote to be descended from” is a transitive relationship, i.e. that if the neanderthal is too remote for us to be descended from (he is), then so is anything further back in history.