Well, I don't remember it either! (what did I have for breakfast.. did I even HAVE breakfast...)
Just how do we know this FACT??
Gee, anthropologists simply followed the trail of prehistoric remains back through the archaeological record and drew conclusions based upon the evidence. 'Course, being a creationist means never having to connect the dots, doesn't it?
Well, for one thing, Homo erectus seemed to have been the first hominid to spread out of Africa to establish itself over much of Europe and Asia as far away as Java. That, and it looks like a probable ancestor, although the branching off of Neanderthal probably comes somewhere in the Archaic H. sapiens line. Some of the earlier Neanderthals in the Middle East look less "extreme Neanderthal" than the robust later European specimens (which were the first found and formed our idea of what a Neanderthal is). People fully dot-connect-enabled can see a pattern in the data.