Dienekes has extensive commentary on a paper that seems to end by leaning toward a predominant Out-of-Africa replacement model for the emergence of modern humans and the transition between Neandertals and our species in Europe. Their method was to use simulations where they tweaked the parameters of the period of transition between the two groups and the effective population size fluctuations of humans. Here is their conclusion:
The significance of ancient Neandertal mtDNA for resolving the fate of Neandertals increases greatly when considered in light of models for modern human origins derived from archaeology. On the basis of mtDNA, if Neandertals survived late in Europe, their per generation contribution to early modern human populations must have been fairly small (
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