Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic riffs on the classic "March of Progress" illustration showing human evolution from early primates to modern Homo sapiens. The sequence proceeds normally through the familiar evolutionary stages, but at the end, a modern human is shown reading a book titled "Paleo-Cloning." The final scene then shows all the earlier evolutionary ancestors brought back to life and having a party, complete with party hats, balloons, and confetti.

The humor lies in the idea that humanity's ultimate achievement in mastering science and technology would be to use cloning to resurrect all of our extinct evolutionary predecessors -- not for any grand scientific purpose, but apparently just to throw them a party. It playfully subverts the triumphalist narrative of the "March of Progress" image by suggesting that the endpoint of human advancement is not some transcendent achievement, but rather a whimsical reunion with our long-lost ancestral relatives.