the-humans
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is set "30 million years from now." A group of birds -- who have apparently become the dominant intelligent species -- are visiting a natural history museum. A sign or guide explains that "scientists now believe the humans were not in fact covered with feathers." The birds look at a featherless human reconstruction and react with disgust: "Ewwwwww" and "They look so stupid!"
The Humor
The joke is a mirror-image of how humans react to dinosaur reconstructions in museums today. When scientists revealed that many dinosaurs likely had feathers rather than the scaly skin we had long imagined, many people found the feathered versions less intimidating or "cool." This comic flips the perspective: in a future where birds are the intelligent species, their default assumption is that any important creature must have had feathers. Learning that humans were featherless is as unsettling and ridiculous to them as learning dinosaurs were feathery was to us. The comedy also works because the birds' disgust at bare human skin is essentially how many humans react to images of featherless birds -- which are genuinely unsettling to look at.
References
This comic plays on the ongoing paleontological revisions about feathered dinosaurs. Since the late 1990s, fossil evidence has increasingly shown that many theropod dinosaurs (the lineage that includes modern birds) had feathers. Public reactions to feathered T. rex reconstructions have often been ones of disappointment or amusement, which this comic cleverly inverts. The 30-million-year timeframe also nods to the idea that birds, as the living descendants of dinosaurs, might eventually re-diversify into dominant large-bodied species if given enough evolutionary time.