'The curiosity of future ages'

'When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations. 
  But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?'
  So begins the Epistle Dedicatory of Sir Thomas Browne's masterpiece, Urn Burial (Hydriotaphia). This passage came to mind the other night when I was half-watching Digging for Britain, an archaeological programme on BBC2. Much of it was dedicated to the excavation of a medieval burial ground containing large numbers of remarkably well preserved skeletons from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Genetic scientists were getting to work on these, extracting DNA (of which the best sources, surprisingly, are the tiny ossicles of the inner ear) to find out what they can about these long dead people and what killed them. Particularly affecting were a pair of young male skeletons, brothers who had died together, of the Black Death, and been buried together. As the scientists probed and tested, I found it uncomfortable viewing. These people certainly did not die expecting 'the curiosity of future ages' to be picking over their bones a few centuries later, and they surely had some sense – as most people still do even now – that their remains amounted to more than just a pile of old bones, and deserved a degree of reverence, of recognition of their individual worth and identity, the soul that once animated those bones. How old do human remains have to be before they forfeit any such claim on posterity? A hundred years? Probably too little. Two hundred? Maybe. Certainly by the time we get back to the medieval period, it seems that human remains, skeletons and bones anyway, have pretty much lost their humanity and become mere objects of forensic curiosity. But is it just a matter of age? Things are different, it seems, with remains that are more recognisably individual, having been mummified or preserved in peat bogs or mountain ice. I recall that on my last visit to Derby Museum and Art Gallery, their two Egyptian mummies, of individuals called Pypyu and Pa-sheri, are displayed with a good deal of interpretive signage and reminders that these were human beings and visitors might find it disturbing to see them on display. Pypyu and Pa-sheri have been better served by posterity than all those much more recent medieval dead.