Unfortunately all of the march of evolution images make a really fundamental simplification that most biologists really find annoying. All of these steps along the way are not part of a linear path towards humans, they are organisms in their own right with many descendants and they radiated into many forms at every step along the way. If you replaced just the last little bit with the branches of very close relatives to modern humans you would have a whole bunch of lineages that coexisted and interbred. We didn’t come from Neanderthals, most humans from the African continent have far less Neanderthal than those from Europe, and the same can be said of East Asia with respect to homo erectus and denisovans. It is all a big messy mix and there is no more or less evolved form of human, just different individuals that we group by similarity and time. The current remaining human species is very large and has sufficient mixing that we are compatible but if a population were to get cut off for a few hundred years they would likely drift to the point of being a new species, but we would still be here, so they wouldn’t get a new step, they would be a new branch off our lineage.

The problem is that scientists usually suck at explaining things to non-scientists.

People who lack the ability to envision how evolution would work over millions of years hear, “we evolved from monkeys” and think, “well, why the fuck are there still monkeys? This makes no sense.”.

A logical thinker understands that, “yeah, a specific branch of monkeys millions of years ago started doing something differently or had a genetic mutation that made them branch off from the rest of the monkeys”

Scientists: “global warming is coming!” Regular people: “nice! I hate being cold.”