At this point, some Africans probably have some Neanderthal in them.

Isn't this ultimately the origin of everything that we recognize as a modern ethnicity? We're all the products of amalgamations of conquered/extinguished tribes, states, empires, and cultures, most of which are lost to history forever.

> "Merged" conjures an image of living peacefully side by side and interbreeding for many generations.

That seems to be what happened with Neanderthals, at least at first.

Incidentally any violence may have been from the Neanderthals because almost all of the genetic data shows Neanderthal ancestry from Neanderthal males and homo sapiens females, and not the other way around.

> "Merged" conjures an image of living peacefully side by side and interbreeding for many generations.

Even when this did happen[1], the record seems to show trickles of gene-flow from these populations entering a much larger stream of genes from a more recently out-of-Africa population.

[1] And in a big complex world, it certainly would have happened sometimes.

Women are people too, so that wouldn't be how such merging happens. Most likely homo sapiens greatly outnumbered the neanderthals, so any neanderthals (whether more or female) that mated with humans had their own DNA diluted and eventually absorbed into the homo sapien population.

All matings that resulted in Neandertal DNA in modern humans were by Neandertal male + Sapiens female.