Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger.
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive.
Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels.
Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting.
Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.