What is all this about microcephalin possibly not being from Neandertals?
Well, the D haplogroup is common in many areas outside of Africa in addition to Europe. So it isn’t possible to really specify in what archaic population it may have originated. There is some chance that it may be found in the Neandertal genome sequence, when that becomes available. In fact, that would be the ultimate test for many candidate introgressive alleles. But there is a good chance that it won’t be found in the Neandertal sequence. After all, Neandertals were probably pretty thin on the ground — especially in Europe. A sampling of their genes would be sort of unlikely to yield a high proportion of archaic alleles that may have survived to the present day. So there is hope that we will find and document such alleles, but the best evidence for many of them may remain their current pattern of variation in living people.
