They don’t evolve from one kind to another in observable time. There is some speciation since the flood, but it’s only in short generation animals. They cannot change from kind to kind, the variety within the Kind just gets bigger. Usually taxonomic families of vertebrates which have huge numbers of species in, or species with huge numbers of subspecies and races are short generation animals and those with few are long-generation animals. If you look at that and see where the lines all converge we can conclude that the Flood could have been about 7,000 years ago.
None of that though is particularly relevant to the question of whether humans are animals. This depends on how you define animals. That there is an analogy in Creation between humans and a series of specieisdered notional forebears is not necessarily relevant to that question either. It is all down to the philosophical stance one takes, especially with regard to the finest spiritual revelations that we have, namely the Bible.
I do not have a problem when atheists start wittering on about how great apes and we have all got a deficiency in the gene to make our own vitamin C, this and other things have no bearing on the fact that God could have made us last Thursday, but for the fact He tells us it was a few thousand years earlier than that. Before that you have 14 billion years of universe production, a spurious and impossible in fact start to life and living cells, and then a chain of evolution, culminating in a standing naked ape which gets language and thought in a conundrum not less impossible to understand than the first living cell coming from soup, all of which of course happened only in the eternal foreknowledge of God the Son, who wrote this in His own mind as a plan, so as to make a home and set the stage for those whom the Father was set to give to Him. (John 17 has all of this information if you look carefully, especially John 17 v 24). Once the Logos sets this plan or Logos in motion, bringing even light and the other laws of physics as we know them into being by speaking that which is in His Plan, then we see it does not take 14 billion years, it takes six days. Six like the six wine barrels at the wedding in Cana, Galilee, which were also filled with vintage wine from water and not wine that appeared to have been made a few minutes earlier. It is a mature creation, it looks partly like it could have evolved, but we are told the real truth, which explains the things that are in it which by no means could have evolved.
Atheists are a bit like some folk who have autism, they have if you like a kind of spiritual autism becuase they look at this world and try to understand it without reference to the Creator. In fact, they really don’t want to know Him.
This is of course very sad, because knowing Him is really all there is, all there is that lasts.
You know what I am talking about.