flowers-2
Explanation
This comic offers a darkly humorous alternative explanation for why ancient burial sites contain flowers. In the first panel, two cavemen stand over a body, and one says "Oh no, accidentally murdered Pag." The other responds "Quick, cover up smell so no one notice," implying they placed flowers on the corpse to mask the smell of their crime rather than as a sentimental gesture.
The second panel, set in the present day, shows a professor explaining to an audience that "even the earliest burial ceremonies used flowers," with the audience responding with a sentimental "Awww." The humor comes from the dramatic irony: modern people interpret the archaeological evidence of flowers in ancient graves as a touching sign of early human compassion and ritual, when the comic suggests the real reason was far more pragmatic and sinister -- covering up a murder.
The comic plays on how we romanticize prehistoric human behavior based on incomplete archaeological evidence, projecting our modern sentimentality onto actions that may have had much cruder motivations.