But the response also raises a question worth sitting with: what does it mean that we respond to this face the way we do?

Part of the answer is simply perceptual — faces trigger face-recognition processes regardless of their provenance.

But part of the answer may go deeper.

If Neanderthals were, as the genetic evidence now establishes, literally our relatives — if they passed genetic material to our ancestors and some of that material persists in us — then the sense of recognition we feel looking at Shanidar Z’s reconstructed face may have a biological basis as well as a psychological one.

She is not a stranger.