They used to, and you still see the chain-of-being type pictures in which the neanderthal is the next thing back from modern man. What they're claiming now is that both we and the neanderthal are descended from homo heidelbergensis, which is a type of homo erectus, and that is laughable: that's like claiming that dogs could not be descended from wolves, therefore they must be descended directly from fish.
Can you give me a citation from any reputable source in the last thirty years that cites neanderthal as a direct ancestor of ours