Most of the images of "archaic homo sapiens" I see around on the net indicate something more backwards than the neanderthal and, again, the neanderthal has been found to be too genetically different from us for us to be descended from him. The problem won't go away by being ignored.
Another take on archaic homo sapiens
All that intergrading and wrangling over classification. Why does that happen?
It's hard to lump things into neat bins when nature isn't really doing that. What's it really doing? Common descent with modification.