“Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops."

Apparently then the RCC has worked out that Neanderthals were "humans" in the Catholic sense i.e. soul-infused hominids. According to their theology, as I understand it, that would mean that since these "humans" had never had the chance to hear the Gospels and be baptized, they would automatically be admitted into heaven in the same way that unbaptized babies, fetuses, bushmen and intelligent aliens from other worlds are. Heaven must be a very interesting place indeed.

Christopher Hitchens would also seem to have a new question for the ID Christian theist then: Why did god create and entire species of human only to let it go extinct 42,000 years before Jesus's arrival?