Michael Shermer is a renowned skeptic and rational writer, having earned several honors for his constant questioning of all things supernatural. An evolutionist, he nevertheless is consistent in his skepticism and with a recently published article in Scientific American challenges something fairly fundamental to the story of human evolution. Creationists have long claimed that the General Thoery of Evolution dehumanizes. If what Shermer writes is valid, then the Creationists can point to one really good example: how evolutionary theory has long dehumanized Neandertals. Below are some quotes from this article and a link to it at the end.

"we must reclassify Homo neanderthalensis as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens."

"A comprehensive and technically sophisticated study published in the May 7 issue of Science, 'A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,' by Max Planck Institute evolutionary anthropologists Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo and 54 of their colleagues, demonstrates that 'between 1 and 4% of the ge­nomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals' and that 'Neandertals are on average closer to individuals in Eurasia than to individuals in Africa.'”

"The Neandertal species did not go extinct, because it was never a separate species; instead population pockets of Neandertals died out around 30,000 years ago, whereas other Neandertal populations survived through interbreeding with their modern human brothers and sisters, who live on to this day."

Source:

Shermer, Michael, "Our Neandertal Brethren: Why They Were Not a Separate Species", Scientific American, August AD 2010, found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=our-neandertal-brethren, accessed August 3rd, AD 2010.