It would benefit posters to understand the full scale of differences between other hominids and homo sapiens, as "brow protrusions" are just the tip of the ice berg. Pretending other differences do not exist does not mean they are not there.

Taking a brisk glance at a skull and saying "Welp, it looks the same as a human's to me so therefore it must be" is not an intelligent reaction. Certain monkey skulls look similar to a homo sapiens' as well. A human embryo and a pig embryo also look remarkably alike at certain stages of development but nobody contends that "pigs are just another race of human since the scientists have got it all wrong".

If Neanderthals are simply a different "race" of homo sapien then so are orangutans.

While they were certainly not primitive sub-humans (they were actually highly evolved in aspects of their morphology and behaviour), the Neanderthals were definitely distinct from living people, different enough to be regarded as a distinct species, H. neanderthalensis, in my view. So for me, what is especially fascinating about the Neanderthals is that they were every bit as human as we are, yet they were different. What we share with them is a measure of what it means to be fully human, what differentiates us is what it means to be a Neanderthal, or a modern human (H. sapiens).