Del Mar Man

Problems remain, and differing lines of evidence suggest that racemization dating of bone is, at best, tentative, and that many of the early dates for human skeletons are wrong. For instance, the Sunnyvale skeleton (racemization dated at 70,000 years B.P.) is morphologically indistinguishable for skeletons dated between 400 and 1600 years B.P. (10). Another important and controversial skeleton was described in Denver. Bada and Masters presented the results of a detailed study of the general composition and extent of racemization of amino acids isolated from the Del Mar Man skeleton (11). 

Bada, J. L. Masters, P. M. Amino Acids in the Del Mar Man Skeleton, Abstracts of Papers, 193rd Meeting of the American Chemical Society, American Chemical Society Washington, DC, 1987. 

Numerous physical, chemical, and biological processes will have acted on fossil bones during their taphonomic history. If one or more of these processes could have produced the high d/l ratio found in the Del Mar Man fossils, for example, then these remains may actually be Holocene in age. If this were the case, then other California bones of known Holocene age ought to be affected similarly. To test this, we analyzed... 

These results are listed in Table III. In none of the cases do the d/l asp ratios determined for these skeletons approach the ratios of 0.4-0.5 determined for the skeletons such as Del Mar Man and Sunnyvale (16,... 

IS). The Holocene samples which we investigated came from a variety of localities which diflEered greatly in their general environmental characteristics. If variations in environmental parameters could produce anomalously high racemization, this should have been detected in at least some of the samples which we analyzed. Since the extent of racemization in the Holocene samples from throughout California is consistently much less than in the Del Mar Man skeleton, etc., this indicates that the most reasonable explanation for the highly racemized amino acids in these latter skeletons is that they are considerably older than the Holocene skeletons. 

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