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| Future Archaeology |
 Title text: "The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly." |
Explanation
This comic is a continuation of the previous comic, 1747: Spider Paleontology, about a time-traveler from the future who has come to see spiders. See 1747: Spider Paleontology for a more complete explanation. The idea is that history is filtered in similar fashion to fossils. What is contemporaneously important, like a spider's web, dinosaur feathers, or the United States presidential election may not survive. Bandwidth limits may pass seemingly less important but much simpler features like chitin exoskeleton, tooth bone, and flood meme.
The joke is that in the future the Biblical story of Noah's Flood is considered as valuable a historical document when researching humans as "That's How I Beat Shaq" (lyrics, video), a pop song by Aaron Carter released in 2000. The survival of both may have been aided by the chance one-degree-off relation to the name Aaron.
The title text expands on the joke by saying that the future archaeologists connected the two historical documents via the biblical story of Moses. Moses also had an older biological brother named Aaron; the future species has hastily concluded that Moses' brother and Aaron Carter are one and the same.
Transcript
[A four-panel comic featuring Cueball, Megan, and a time-traveler from the distant future, possibly from somewhere other than Earth. The time-traveler is depicted as a solid, floating black dot surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, surrounded by small dots. In the second panel, the depiction is slightly larger, implying greater focus by Megan and Cueball.]
[Megan, Cueball and the Time-traveller converse as they casually walk, and float along.]
Megan: Since you're from the future, do you know who wins the election?
Time-traveller: Haven't the faintest idea.
Time-traveller: Hardly any text has been recovered from your era, so we know little about your history and culture.
Time-traveller: [Quietly] We're mostly here for the spiders anyway.
[The Time-traveller stops. Megan and Cueball focus on the Time-traveller.]
Time-traveller: There are only two written accounts we've reconstructed.
Time-traveller: We don't know whether they describe real events or myths.
[The Time-traveller drifts backward, Megan and Cueball, stop and look back toward the Time-traveller.]
Time-traveller: One is a story about a man who built a boat to survive a great flood.
Megan: Oh yeah. Noah.
Cueball: We do like our flood narratives.
[The Time-traveller drifts slowly further backward. Megan and Cueball, continue standing as they listen intently.]
Time-traveller: The other is an account of how a man named Aaron Carter defeated a god named Shaq.
Megan: That one may have been mangled a bit by the eons.
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