That’s academic for “we have no idea what this was for”. Except in the case of “fertility ritual” – that means it’s a sex toy.

Now that you mention it, it’s commonly used for the contemporary idiocy too.

I have so many ritual purposes

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Humans have this tendency of assuming everyone else is dumb. Whether that’s their neighbor, a different generation, a foreign nation, different skin colors, different religions, different species or indeed extinct civilizations, pretty much everyone is assumed to be barbaric, until proven otherwise.

And so, yeah, it’s usually a revelation like wow, they had calendars, they must have actually been smarter than we thought.

The opposite