In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.
There's no such rule and Neanderthals are not notable as an exception. Fertility is just a very rough proxy for genetic distance, which is correlated to our arbitrary "species" buckets but by no means a real line or hard rule. Many, many reasonably closely related species can interbreed, like jaguars and lions. Most of homo that had the opportunity could probably interbreed.