"Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time."

This is a lie by the way as birds also possess the gene for language but it doesn't mean they speak; that the so-called sophisticated tools were made exclusively by the Neanderthal (before interbreeding) is still to be proven. This is all part of that PR campaign I posted about a few years back when we first began debating this issue. It is now obvious that the scientists had confirmed HSN-HSS interbreeding long ago and were merely buying time to clean up the image of the previously much, maligned Neanderthal.