Neanderthal DNA is halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, that's the most major fact in the picture. Scientists have no qualms about presenting every other hominid as glorified apes but the Neanderthal has been a sort of a poster child for kum-bay-ah religion, thus it comes as a sort of a shock to many of them when the Neanderthal also turns out to be a glorified ape. Best resource on the web is Vendramini's:
www.themandus.org
I've got problems with Vendramini's thesis about SQ hominids punk-eeking into Cro Magnons, but what he has to say about Neanderthals is perfectly logical.