Hey Cat....good to hear from you:) I have never tried tobacco, has anyone else tried it? The only reference I ever heard about that was the old Bauman story. 

A struggle for me is the close human association in terms of alleged DNA results.   And yet the morphology and behavior are not so similar. Almost not inside the parameters of the Homo genus at all.   I say almost because while Homo Erectus used fire and stone tools? We don't know often they were used. Or if groups lost the ability because of topography and resources as they moved.   All great ideas to ponder.👍🏼

The pieces do not fit neatly.   There's always something we have to willfully ignore, something that it doesn't look right to ignore.   I've often wondered if bigfoot wasn't a Homo erectus descendant, tiny population cut off in North America and forced by extreme climate to drift genetically quite rapidly.   That much has been shown to happen in other species.    That could account for the Cerutti mastadon site, for example.   It could account for the lack of ancestral fossils in North America as well.   It could potentially account for the DNA samples coming back as so near us they appear to be contamination or environmentally degraded rather than as a separate species.   However, like every other answer, there seems to be a problem.   In this instance the problem comes up if we try to equate bigfoot here with Almasty, yeren, maybe yowie .. because those from Europe and Asia, maybe Australia, are not separated from the larger H. erectus population in the same way any in North America would have been and continued connection with a larger population would have buffered out that sort of truly rapid genetic drift.   There just is not a good, clean answer so far.

Denisovan

Good video and the main speaker was sure Homo erectus had a basic language. It migrated out of Africa and may have associated with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. It was about the size of a 5' human being or a little larger.  There is no mention of Homo erectus being in the Homo sapien's genome.    "Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, spanning nearly 2 million years. It is the first human species to evolve a humanlike body plan and gait, to leave Africa and colonize Asia and Europe, and to wield fire. Some populations of H. erectus were ancestors of later human species, including H. heidelbergensis—the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals", ... Wikipedia   "In the last two months, news outlets have been abuzz with the announcement of what many suggested was a new hominin species. In 2008, a 40,000 year old pinky bone from a child was discovered in a Siberian cave. The bone was not enough to identify the species of its possessor, but since both Neanderthals and humans are known to have lived in the area at the time, scientists assumed it belonged to one of these two species. That all changed in March of this year, when German researchers announced that they’d managed to extract DNA from the fossil — and it didn’t match up to the known genetic sequences of either humans or Neanderthals! In fact, the human and Neanderthal sequences were more similar to each other than either was to the fossil’s sequence!"   WAS IT HOMO ERECTUS?