This New York Times article offers an interesting discussion about how Western European scientific racism also played a significant role in how we classified and described Neanderthals.
"Neanderthals Were People, Too" (2017) asks us to think about how the same racial thinking that supported the brutalities of Western imperialism also filtered into our understanding of pre-history.
As long-form journalism, this would be an interesting piece to assign alongside anthropological classics on scientific and systemic racism, racial thinking, and colonialism as part of the history of anthropological thought. Alternatively, it might be a good discussion piece for thinking about epistemological questions, and how science is part of a deeply cultural worldview.