Indeed, some scholars have probably thought about it more than I have, but apparently they aren't here. Maybe it's just art, but even art has an economical purp

Indeed, some scholars have probably thought about it more than I have, but apparently they aren't here. Maybe it's just art, but even art has an economical purpose that yields information about the suffiecient and necessary conditions to create it, and it is not merely an expression of the magical thinking implied by what is usually referred to as ritual and religious purposes. If it takes "days," you still need to get those days of water out there in addition to the weight of food and shelter. If their threats were nomadic, a false path imposes costs on incoming threats, and for as you say, the cost of only a few days with a small team. One set of ideas provides testable hypothesis - the other produces unfalsifiable categories of "ritual purposes" and it seems like lazy journalism. I hear exasperation about ancient aliens type theories from academics all the time, but when you read all these "ritual purposes" cliche statements, it's hard to see how they didn't do it to themselves and invite the kookery on their own disciplines.