we Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with neanderthals, commonly beleive to be H. heidelbergensis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis who evolved in Africa. So you can pretty much say that neanderthals was kind of humans as well. it's often why we refer to them and denisovans as cousins, fascinating stuff really ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal has a pretty good section on the evolution of neanderthals.