Before there were good ways to record and play back bass sounds, did anybody bother to train their voice to sing low bass? I imagine the uses for the skill would be rather limited before good microphones, recording equipment and widely available hi-fi stereos to play back bass sounds.
Yes.
Amplification does not require electronics. Good acoustics in a hall can be all you need for all vocal registers to be heard. (Edit: Whether a hall is a church isn’t strictly relevant. Took that part out.)
Even if you can’t quite pick out the low notes in poor acoustics, they’ll be bolstering the sub-harmonics of the higher pitches, giving weight to the performance anyway.
And for small groups around a fire you don’t need a hall at all, which gets us back to prehistory easily.