Neandertals Interbred with Homo Sapiens After All?

In the midst of all the election results, big news just broke in anthropology in that a team of geneticists found a gene that likely came from interbreeding with Neandertals. The gene in question is the Microcephalin gene, which regulates brain size. The thought is that our large brains may have come in part from Neandertals -- they did have larger brains than Homo Sapiens.

Darth Quixote at GNXP talked about how hybrids of related species are hardier and tend to take over an environment, and the thought is that right about the time this gene was acquired is when the prehistoric cave artwork was drawn in places like Lascaux and Chauvet. Maybe this creative impulse came as a result of sudden larger brains due to inbreeding with Neandertals.

Here's where I'm particularly confused though: the articles keep talking about haplogroup D. Is that the Y-chromosome or mtDNA haplogroup? Wikipedia states that the mtDNA haplogroup D is in Asia, Sibera and North America; Y-Haplogroup D is Tibet and Japan, especially the Ainu. Steve Sailer compares the microcephalin variant to the ASPM variant, but skirts around an explanation. I'm sure this is such a newbie thing to these guys, but none of the lay articles explain it either. I'm hoping John Hawks adds this to his Introgression FAQ. I'll be re-reading all of these articles just in case I missed the explanation somewhere.

Razib over at Science Blogs has a photo of representation of a Neanderthal child and some good explanation on the issue.

John Hawks is evidently just about ready to publish a paper related to introgression, "living Neanderthals" and the "Celtic Fringe."

Oh John, you're such a tease!