[Avodah] Do we Owe Respect to Old Bones?

[Micha Berger]

>From RAFolger's recent blog entry by the same title as this
post
<http://ariefolger.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/do-we-owe-respect-to-old-bones>:
    So there's this this debate going on in England about a skeleton that
    was displayed apparantly against the explicit wish of its erstwhile
    live person (should we call it its "owner"?), Charles Byrne, and
    people are arguing whether to finally bury it, or whether so much
    time has passed (some 230 years) that it is no longer relevant.

Sample of said debate and RAF's review of a comment ellided.

    ... True, if Byrne is burried, many more skeletons in musea throughout
    the world might become candidates for burial, but so be it. Who
    says we gain *as a society* by displaying our ancestors in glass
    cages? Does respect for the life and the living thereby increase? We
    should indeed bury them even if that represents a major loss to
    many musea.

    I am willing to respect one exception: skeletons older than, say,
    6000 years, i.e., from before Adam. That is because regardless on
    where one stands on the question of creationism and evilution, I
    believe that the Account of Creation of Man is a meaningful source
    of practical consequences. In fact, I wonder whether we'd say that
    such old skeletons convey tumah (ritual impurity imparted by, for
    example, bones of deceased people)

So the question RAF raises is one of age.

I was also thinking whether this has a nafqa mina lemaaseh. If one follows
R' Moshe Eisenman's take on the Ramban that the "afar min ha'adamah"
that HQBH blew a nishmas chayim into was one of many homo spaiens, would
the remains of these homo sapiens impart tum'ah? What about the bones
of apes? Adnei hasadeh -- which it is a violation of retzhichah to kill?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When you come to a place of darkness,
micha at aishdas.org        you don't chase out the darkness with a broom.
http://www.aishdas.org   You light a candle.
Fax: (270) 514-1507        - R' Yekusiel Halberstam of Klausenberg zt"l