Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us

They were long derided as knuckle-draggers, but new discoveries are setting the record straight. As we rethink the nature of the Neanderthals, we could also learn something about our own humanity

There's a human type we've all met: people who find a beleaguered underdog to stick up for. Sometimes, the underdog is an individual - a runt of a boxer, say. Sometimes, it is a nation, threatened by a larger neighbour or by the rising sea. Sometimes, it is a tribe of Indigenous people whose land and health are imperilled. Sometimes, it is a language down to its last native speakers. The underdog needn't be human: there are species of insect, even of fungi, that have their advocates. But what all these cases all have in common is that the objects of concern are still alive, if only just. The point of the advocacy is to prevent their extinction. But what if it's too late? Can there be advocates for the extinct?

The past few years have seen an abundance of works of popular science about a variety of human beings who once inhabited Eurasia: Neanderthals". They died out, it appears, 40,000 years ago. That number - 40,000 - is as totemic to Neanderthal specialists as that better known figure, 65 million, is to dinosaur fanciers.