I don't have the time ATM to research these findings more, but if true this could have a huge impact on everything we think we know about Neanderthals interacting with anatomically modern humans.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-neanderthals-died-earlier-believed.html

Exactly, sparrow.  Most of what we know about the interactions come from contemporaneous sites and from genetic analysis.  The dating was an early hint, but isn't what's relied on any more.

And a redating from 29,000 to 39,000 years isn't that significant anyway.

LOL Paleo Dude

I was wondering about that too, but I was hoping that the researchers involved wouldn't overlook something like that before announcing this lol.  Maybe they're just looking to grab headlines?

The other articles across the web are saying that this could mean that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans may have never (or barely) interacted in Europe, and that the interbreeding may have happened in the middle east instead.

That's a far cry from the belief that we are what caused the neanderthals to go extinct lol

Here's a link to the actual paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1018938108

Since only the abstract is free, here's a link to an analysis:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/late/mezmaiskaya-dating-2011.html

Basically the paper is extrapolating way beyond their experimental evidence.

The other articles across the web are saying that this could mean that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans may have never (or barely) interacted in Europe, and that the interbreeding may have happened in the middle east instead.

We already knew interbreeding happened in the middle east, because Asians whose primary lines of ancestry never went through Europe have the same neanderthal percentage as Europeans do.

The paper claims the overlap in Europe is reduced from millennia to centuries, but that's still plenty of time for "modern" humans to have wiped out the neanderthals, one way or another.