[Lurking Libertarian]

Thanks for the link. I knew Neanderthals had been ruled out as ancestors of homo sapiens, but I didn't know it had been based on DNA studies. But nothink in those links suggests that h. erectus couldn't be ancestral to both sapiens and neanderthal.

[medved]

But nothink in those links suggests that h. erectus couldn't be ancestral to both sapiens and neanderthal.

That should be obvious. Erectus is older than the neanderthal and visually much further from us than the neanderthal. At this point, in order to demonstrate that modern man evolved, you'd have to produce some new hominid (as a plausible ancestor) which was closer to us both in morphology and time than the neanderthal and, had such a creature ever existed, his works and remains would be very easy to find. Erectus does not qualify here since that is clearly going the wrong way.