I was really surprised that the papers out in Nature and Science last week on Neanderthal genomics didn't make a bigger splash. When I got the advance info I was really excited about it and would have loved to do something about it, but decided not to, because I kind of assumed it would be splashed out everywhere in any case (and also, because it would have become stressful to meet the deadline). But then there wasn't that much coverage or resonance at all.
People, this is our closest relative _ever_ ! The Nature authors report 1 million base pairs and say they can finish the entire genome in 2 years. The Science people have a smaller number of bases, but have focussed on regions containing interesting genes, so they may get just as much valuable information out of it in the end. Read all about it in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7117/index.html
and Science: