Yeah fair

Or maybe it's so normal for us to do it to animals that we don't really make note of it. Many people believe their pets possess a level of reasoning they simply don't, and get exasperated when their pets act their actual level of reasoning. That's so normal we look past it, now and probably then.

Don't know if there's specific reasoning about things we don't understand, but assigning things agency in general seems to just be that our brains are predisposed to it. We instinctively understand things the way we understand other humans: by gut-feeling what we would feel in their/it's position.

A lot of modern archaeology would agree with me on that, as I understand it. But I could be wrong.

Honestly, if you look at why we do such things these days the answer is usually "because I could and wanted to or was curious." Ancient peoples aren't any different. The problem archeology can have is it's easy to assign too much meaning to what we do know. Maybe the path just went to a nice view.

If it's asserted without any evidence, that's ultimately just bad science, but I guess it can be an easy assumption because we still do often assign some degree of agency to the stuff around us. "The damn car *refuses* to start" and such.

Creating gods also isn't necessarily a default, for instance Angry Vulcano Guy typically just pulls the lever in the lava factory. We might call that a god but they might've seen it as just another nature spirit or something.

"Ritualistic use" isn't necessarily religious. Making coffee every morning is ritualistic, imbuing money with value is ritualistic, etc. The term gets used a lot for "we don't quite understand why they did it."

Like it or not this technology is here to stay and if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind in your industry