Much of the text is the usual interminable ingroup squabble among Darwinians about “human speciation” but we do learn things of interest:
The Dragon Man appears to be a 50-something male who was likely a very large and powerful individual. The authors suggest his small hunter-gatherer community settled on a forested floodplain in a Middle Pleistocene environment that could be harsh and quite cold. The fossil is the northernmost known from the Middle Pleistocene, which may have meant that large size and a burly build were necessary adaptations.
Petraglia agreed that populations living in the region were likely pretty small and probably isolated. “Maybe that’s what’s creating this diversity in this group of hominins,” he says, noting that Pleistocene humans are known from the rainforests of southern China to the frigid north. “They were cognitively advanced enough, or culturally innovative enough, that they could live in these extreme environments from rainforests to cold northern climates,” he says.
Brian Handwerk, “A 146,000-Year-Old Fossil Dubbed ‘Dragon Man’ Might Be One of Our Closest Relatives” at Smithsonian Magazine
See also: “Massive” human head forcing rethink of evolution. At the Guardian: “Homo longi is heavily built, very robust,” said Prof Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at Hebei. “It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans.”