Sarcasm: A People's Prehistory
There are a lot of levels to making and understanding a sarcastic statement, and it assumes a pretty high level of brain development on each side of the conversation. Different layers of meaning are all wrapped up in a remark that at the best of times makes you come off as a jerk. You're saying something you don't mean to convey the opposite meaning and usually that you think the person you're speaking to is stupid. That's a lot to unpack, but since you can read you're presumably not an idiot you don't have trouble figuring it out. Dick heads who study linguistics think they know a lot about sarcasm cause of symbolic logic/other dumb-shit science terms that they use to fill up a book explaining what I just thoroughly covered in a couple dozen words.
But they weren't around in caveman times. None of us were, in fact. Back then, sarcasm was extremely dangerous.
When australopithecus anamensis (no homo) was roaming around the savannas of Africa, the weird-looking monkeys developed a crude means of communication that was mostly limited to a series of meaningful looks. It's hard to be sarcastic when your vocabulary is limited to happy face, sad face, and let's bone face. To them, expression of irony was limited to the cave-wall-painting short story "Gift of the Cave-Magi." Eventually they were all dead and homo erectus started knockin' about (that's what he said), and he could say a few things. This is when sarcasm claimed its first life.
The first pre-recorded use of sarcasm came as two early hominids were standing at the edge of a cliff. There was a lake at the foot of this cliff and both pre-men were extremely thirsty, as you would be in Africa. One of them turned to the other and asked (not nearly so eloquently) "do you think we should jump down there and get a drink?" The other, realizing that this cliff was nearly a thousand proto-meters high, responded, sarcastically, "Yes, we could definitely survive that fall." Since nobody in the history of grunts, clicks, squeals, whistles, or words had ever used them to express something other than their literal intention, the first kinda-smart-monkey took the second at his word and immediately flung himself off the edge to his death.
The development of sarcastic statements quickly outpaced the brainy apes' ability to process and understand them. Soon sentences like "Oh, those berries that killed Elder Hairy-nose? No they probably aren't poisonous anymore." and "Yes, sweetie, go out and play, I'm sure the cave-tiger's not prowling around the entrance to our cave-cave anymore." were getting people eaten/dead left and right. Nobody understood what was happening, not even the victims, because they were all dead. Occasionally someone would ask "Do you really mean it?" but, invariably, the reply was a sarcastic "Sure I do," because sarcastic jerks can't help themselves which is why nobody likes them.
Eventually, in what I am assured is a gross oversimplification of the evolutionary process, natural selection began working to stop hominids from going extinct. While the cave-men, cave-women, and cave-genderqueer still didn't understand sarcasm, the sarcastic jerk in the tribe could understand that every time they spoke, someone died. It was hard enough to survive with a bunch of idiots as your friends, but going it alone would mean certain death. It was then that the concept of "just shutting the fuck up sometimes" was invented, and as it spread from tribe to tribe, thousands of cave-lives were saved. Humanity thrived, and the little brains of our ancestors eventually became powerful enough to handle sarcasm and invent the cotton gin.