working on a feature on the Neanderthal genomics, I found something that I rather shockingly missed last year. Using the technology reported here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7057/abs/nature03959.html

genome sequencing has become 100 times faster than before. Apparently, it is now possible to sequence entire bacterial genomes several times over in a single 4 hour run of the miracle machine ... Very embarrassingly, this paper was published in Nature and was quietly sitting on my shelf, unread

The best news for the Neanderthal people is of course that the machine works with fragments of around 100 bases length -- and that is the state in which their DNA arrives in the lab anyway !