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There's the famous statistic that at one point 17 women reproduced for every man. But if you trace down that claim, it's likely that such an event happened during our hunter gatherer past, not during civilization. I'm not sure that tournament dynamics are compatible with the maintenance of civilization: the polygamous Islamic dynasties were famously unstable, as characterized by Ibn Khaldun, and were repeatedly overthrown by more cohesive, more monogamous groups from the periphery. If you don't have buy-in from most men (and women), and family formation ceases, it's almost tautological that you can't maintain the structure of society. This is a key insight from J.D. Unwin's Sex and Culture, and the strongest counter argument against extreme forms of feminism and sexual libertinism.
My understanding is that it was during the bronze age, not among hunter-gatherers. And that it was driven, not by massive harems, but by warfare.
The men of one village/clan (who mostly share Y chromosomes due to their shared kinship) attack another clan/village, kill the men and take the women as war-brides. This wipes out the Y chromosomes of the conquered group but not the mitochondrial DNA from the women. The newly expanded clan branches off, forming new villages. So successful male genetic dynasties expand while unsuccessful ones are wiped out. Over time, you get the 1/17 ratio showing up in the genetic data.
It's not as if a typical family structure was one patriarch and 17 wives. More like one man with a wife from his own clan, plus maybe a slave-wife from a conquered clan.
Although you're absolutely right that polygamy is unstable, it also leads to lower birth rates. A polygamous man may have very high fertility, but his 2nd+ wives have lower fertility than if they'd just married monogamously.
Ahh yes you and the other commenters are correct. I mistakenly thought the 1:17 was during the Toba event (massive volcano eruption 30k years ago) but looks like that's wrong from a quick google search.
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If I had to guess, I would say that /u/thenelection is correct, that it was actually the rise of agriculture which resulted in such an extreme ratio. But even if the ratio is "a more reasonable 4:1," that's still consistent with my claim that man is naturally a tournament species. It seems pretty clear to me that most men would build a harem if they could get away with it. And that most women would join a harem if it were socially acceptable and the economics worked.
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You reverse it. Civilization didn't free us from the bottleneck; it created it. Hunter gatherers had a ratio of something like 2:1 to 4:1. It was simply materially impossible for one man to monopolize reproductive access in a community. The advent of agriculture 5000 to 7000 years ago caused that ratio to skyrocket to the 17:1 figure (which is better stated as the ratio of effective genetic population size, but the implication is directionally correct). See "A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture" (https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459.full.pdf).
Later on, as sedentary societies evolved and monogamy norms were created and propagated themselves, the ratio dropped back to a more reasonable 4:1 or 5:1.
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