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When I daydream about the five people I'd like to meet in heaven, it's often not Socrates & Co., or even Great-grandpa Carl Johan from Sweden. Instead, it's a lineup of extinct hominids, stretching from Australopithecus aferensis to Homo neanderthalensis, the latest star from human prehistory.

That's Neanderthal man - the guy some scientists claim you could give a shave and a haircut and take to Coronado Mall, and nobody would notice the difference.

With apologies to the many Homo sapiens who have deeply studied Neanderthals and issues of genetic engineering, I believe it's time to think even more seriously about bringing one back from the dead.

I've been fascinated with anthropology from a young age. The kind of love, yearning, respect and gratitude genealogy addicts feel for their more-immediate ancestors - I've felt it for our much-more-distant relatives who persisted across oceans of time.

The causes of this reverie are current reports in the journals Nature and Science, about spectacular progress scientists have made in mapping the Neanderthal genome. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., say they've sequenced about a million genetic building blocks, using DNA extracted from a fossilized Neanderthal bone. The entire genome, 3-billion-plus blocks long, should be done within two years.

One can extract a staggering amount of hidden information from DNA. For example, the scientists say - tentatively - that the new evidence suggests humans and Neanderthals did not interbreed, though they shared a common ancestor 760,000 years ago and shared the Earth in their most-modern forms for 100,000 years or more. Neanderthals vanished mysteriously as late as 28,000 years ago.

Scientists could learn many more things, though, from a living Neanderthal - which they'll likely be able to conceive, once cloning is perfected. Do not doubt. DNA was discovered by Watson and Crick only within my lifetime - and look how far biotechnology has come since.

Did Neanderthals have language? What went on in their larger brain? Did it give them special insights into The Mystery? Could we get along? What would they think of us? What kinds of lessons could we cull from a living Neanderthal?

Thoughtful humans have raised solemn qualms about reviving extinct species. Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" examined some of the darker consequences, for one of hundreds of examples from popular and scientific literature. Ethically, it would be wrong to use a living hominid for research, rather than treat him as an end in himself. Practically, there's only so much to learn from a Neanderthal stripped of his mates, history and culture.

But could one be revived ethically and fruitfully, with respect?

Murphy's law says what can go wrong, will go wrong. That's sobering. More so is this corollary: What can be done, will. Let's be as careful, patient and proactive about our Neanderthal cousins as we can.