In ancient times Gorillas were considered another sub-group of people.

https://www.quora.com/What-did-ancient-humans-think-about-gorillas-Were-they-considered-savage-men-or-just-animals

"Hanno called them “gorillae,” which apparently meant “hairy men” in one of the local languages used by his interpreters:"

“Amazingly, gorillas wouldn't be encountered again by western explorers until the sixteenth century AD, nearly two thousand years later. An English sailor named Andrew Battel was captured by the Portuguese off the coast of West Africa. Battel, kept on the mainland, described two kinds man-like apes (gorillas and chimpanzees) that could occasionally be seen prowling around the campfire. Later accounts in the 1600's would confuse these animals with pygmy tribesmen.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator

"Finally arriving at a bay, the "Horn of the South", there is an island with hostile, hirsute men named "Gorillas""

We can see based on our history that what counts as "people" is a spectrum.

Once upon a time Jews wouldn't have counted the gentiles as people.

Christians wouldn't have counted pagans as people.

Muslims would not have counted infidel as people.

The Britishers did not count third world as people.

The Germans did not count the Jews as people during WW2.

The Jews don't count the Palestinians as people.

What counts as people keeps changing every few decades with some new group no longer counting as people.

It is entirely possible that a thousand years from now we will look at some of the ethnicity from this era and honestly wonder how the people could have been dumb enough in those times to mistake those ethnicity as actual people like themselves.

Would we in the future have museums with skulls of East Asians or Sub Saharan Africans next to the skulls of Homo Neanderthals and Homo Erectus? Honestly nobody knows.