Question:
Answer:
Yes, Neanderthals had souls or a life principle. Every living being of a material nature, including animals and plants, have souls.
However, unlike human beings, Neanderthals did not have rational souls. That is, they were not made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Rather, as the great lay apologist Frank Sheed writes in Theology for Beginners, “their souls are material, limited to matter, not producing any operation that goes beyond matter.” Whereas, Sheed says, a human being’s soul is a spirit:
It not only the thing that souls do, but the things that spirits do. By intellect and will, it knows and loves as spirits know and love: in its thinking it handles the abstract and the universal. Man, having a body and soul, is an animal; but he is a rational animal, for alone of the animals he has a soul which is a spirit.