Are you suggesting that mating success was probably at parity by sex for prehistoric humans? Because I would be very interested to know more about why you think that.
The last time I looked into it , it was thought that similar to many other species, female mate selection was the primary social driver of fitness selection , and that hyper-successful males effectively reduced the mating opportunities of less competitive males, while gestational opportunities were effectively at nearly 100 percent utilisation within a population.
If the thinking on that has changed for prehistoric humans (or pre-industrial ones) the reasons for that change of conjecture would be very interesting.
Or is it that you are suggesting that areproducrive men filled roles in prehistoric society in such a way that made them valued to the group in roles that were lower risk rather than higher risk? Because that would suggest that observed behaviour in modern pre-industrial societies was a newer innovation rather than a holdover from earlier behaviour, which seems like it would be difficult to substantiate. (Not that observations of indigenous peoples has typically been of a very high epistemological rigour)
A anecdotal but interesting perspective came from my grandfather, who spent his youth among indigenous tribes of eastern Oregon in the 1880s. His many accounts of the “Indians” included the idea that younger, unmated, shamed, or less clever men would typically attempt feats of bravery to gain renown and credibility within their tribe, often being killed in the process.
While hardly epistemologically rigorous, this would seem to support the idea that lower status men in precolonial societies would voluntarily engage in high risk behaviour, often disposing of themselves in the process.
When you consider the frequency of death of women from childbirth related complications under such conditions, it makes sense that the mortality rate of men would need to be balanced by similar risks in order to maintain a stable, cohesive society under primitive conditions, and that the ones who would take those risks voluntarily would be the ones who had more to gain by doing so (elevating themselves from a status of comparative irrelevance to improve mate abundance and social status in general)
If these ideas have been contradicted by recent research, I’d love to know more about that. The field of evolutionary psychology is pretty hit and miss, and also really, really poorly understood by the layperson.
Now, not so much if you want a functional civic society.