The human genome contains some 3.2 billion chemical nucleotide bases, grouped within some 30,000 genes.
The Nature paper concluded that human and Neanderthal DNA diverged between 465,000 and 569,000 years ago, and that Neanderthals, like humans, "derived from a very small ancestral population of about 3,000 individuals."
Rubin's study, published in the journal Science, used what is called a "metagenomic" technique to sequence some 65,000 base pairs of Neanderthal DNA which are amplified through replication in bacteria. The result is then further amplified using enzymes.
Rubin works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and is director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, also in California.
His analysis yielded a similar, albeit wider, estimate of when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals took different evolutionary paths: between 120,000 and 670,000 years ago.
The more we learn about the hominids who didn't cut the evolutionary grade, the scientists concluded, the more we learn about ourselves.
"The full Neanderthal genome," they added, will also help resolve a long-standing debate: "In evolution, how important are mutations in genes that result in structural and physiological changes, compared with mutations that affect the regulation of those genes?"
The first evidence for the Neanderthals emerged in 1856, when workers at a lime quarry in the Neander Valley, western Germany, came across bones initially thought to be that of a bear.
Since then, the remains of about 400 Neanderthals have been found, at sites ranging from southern England to continental Europe and the Middle East.
