In his 1735 Systemae Naturae, Linnaeus put humans into the genus Homo, and included that under Anthromorpha ("man-shaped") with Simia (all primates other than lemurs) and Bradypus (sloths). He was not at all implying a common lineage. He grouped animals by their appearance — number of limbs, mode of walking, type of teeth, things like that. He was saying that these groups were different in appearance than the other groups (e.g., the next group down included lions, tigers, and bears — oh my — but did not at all imply they were related, just that they were similar in appearance).

Linnaeus was a strict Creationist who believed that species were entirely created and fixed into place by God. There was nothing evolutionary whatsoever about his scheme. His book is extremely explicit about this. Here are the first four paragraphs of the 1735 edition, which gives you both his argument and his style of writing (axiomatic/deductive):

1. If we observe God's works, it becomes more than sufficiently evident to everybody, that each living being is propagated from an egg and that every egg produces an offspring closely resembling the parent. Hence no new species are produced nowadays.

2. Individuals multiply by generation. Hence at present the number of individuals in each species is greater than it was at first.

3. If we count backwards this multiplication of individuals in each species, in the same way as we have multiplied forward (2), the series ends up in one single parent, whether that parent consists of one single hermaphrodite (as commonly in plants) or of a double, viz. a male and a female, (as in most animals).

4. As there are no new species (1); as like always gives birth to like (2); as one in each species was at the beginning of the progeny (3), it is necessary to attribute this progenitorial unity to some Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, namely God, whose work is called Creation. This is confirmed by the mechanism, the laws, principles, constitutions and sensations in every living individual.

Today we read taxonomy as being about biological relationships. But this was not Linnaeus' goal or intent. He saw the categorizing animal, plant, and mineral entities as an expedient means of identifying them, so that scientists would have a shared language no matter where they were located.

In short, to see Linnaeus as implying humans and apes are related is ahistorical. He engendered no such controversy, because it is not at all what he was arguing or implying. Darwin was one who implied that these shared appearances implied shared ancestry, a very different sort of argument. (And Darwin was not at all the first evolutionist, as an aside. He was just the most persuasive of them.)