I’ve seen a couple of hundred thousand, but I get your drift. But the Neanderthals and a few others were pretty close to modern humans.
Wow ping.
One of the more famous old-earth scientist/theologians, Hugh Ross, has pointed out quite a difference between the Neandert[h]als and Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens has a much larger brain to body ratio than any purported predecessors, and in apparently explicit room for more cerebrum.
DNA and rare soft tissue samples (as occasionally a specimen will be found encapsulated in original ice) will be able to speak a lot more clearly to the biological evolutionary questions than today’s phenotype tracing can — and as of yet, just the entire human genome is still a cumbersome thing to trace. I take phenotype tracing with a huge grain of salt, as things which were considered almost the same in phenotype have shown up to have a relatively large difference in genotype.