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

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.