It could also be that Homo erectus did NOT exist.  Milford Wolpoff has been one of themost vocal evolutionists calling for the sinking of the taxon 'Homo erectus' into 'Homo sapiens.'  He says we either admit erectus/sapiens boundary is arbitrary and use nonmorphological criteria for determining it, or sink erectus into Homo sapiens.  Franz Weidenriech wrote the original descriptions of Sinanthropus pekinensis and made fine plaster casts before the original fossils were lost.  He recognized that theis classic Homo erectus material was not different from Homo sapiens.  He felt the best appropriate name would have been Homo sapiens erectus pekinensis, otherwise it would appear as a proper 'species' different than Homo sapiens.
So if erectus is a fuzzy terminology and Nostratic is a division created by and for linguists, then where are we?  Could be that both erectus and Nostratic should be thrown out.
 
Gerry
----- Original Message -----
From: ehlsmith <ehlsmith@...>
To: Nostratica@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 3:32 PM
Subject: [Nostratica] Re: Swadesh Lists

I still don't get the relevance of Nostratic to Homo erectus's
language. Even if it could be shown that H. erectus and H. sapiens co-
existed in a particular geographic area at some point, how could you
know that they shared a language?

Ned