Must be religious reasons. Maybe they serve a purpose in rituals by Swiss shaman.
Anthropologists have no creativity.
I think is a fair description of Swiss mechanical watches.
They are certainly not of practical significance.
Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day.
There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.
By the time they became mainly an accessory/status symbol sumptuary laws weren’t a thing.
when a child gets interested or wants to help those tribe members making stone tools, it is not yet aware of difficulty levels of different materials.
teaching a newcomer to make a proper tool from a more annoying material, may make their skills more robust when relaxing to easier materials later on.
think of all the skills you had to learn in your own education, and how little of it you actually use today, or at least how little you think you use of it today.
Many casual readers confuse statements such as
"which *may* have had symbolic or ritual significance."
Attribution of potential cause of inferred behaviour to "ritual" is a long standing practice in archaeology; it's code for "we don't know" and covers all manner of things that may simply have developed as habit over years, may have unknown and non supernatural causes / motivations, etc.
It doesn't seem far fetched that this started from a similar place in humans, but has been wildly adapted in the time since as our abilities grew and the complexity of our society increased. Very hard to prove any thing like this though.
Besides, that green quartz crystal is beautiful. If you can only afford to carry a limited number of objects then I personally would try to find a way to turn it into an object I can hold, use, and admire every day.
Crap, I just wrote the bible.
Only once long distance trade routes/gathering expeditions were a thing, people used material from further away. E.g. there are examples of obsidian from a specific location in Yellowstone being found up to a thousand miles away[2].
[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/...
[2] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff....
Cultural considerations aside, “ritual” also does not mean religious.
Someone pointed out that Americans ritually go to ballparks to consume hot dogs and the distinction between ritual and religion finally clicked for me.
The sentence "Survival of the fittest" isn't exactly true, the more accurate description would be "Survival of the fit enough". Curiosity itself is a means to explore the problem space of reality. If you're not curious then changes in your environment may leave you unable to adapt. If you're too curious then you can end up in situations where it removes members of your species faster than they can breed. Even after the point of the individual learning something new it doesn't do much for the existing members of your species. The most optimal outcome seems like some sort of cautious mimesis transfer. In the same idea as "monkey see, monkey do", there doesn't have to be a why, other than it doesn't harm the prime directive of stay alive, get more food, breed.
That is, these quartz arrowheads are a very early version of a meme.
Swiss watches are absolutely steeped in cultural significance. The phrase “Swiss watch” immediately conjures a whole bunch of related meaning beyond the literal meaning of a wrist-worn timepiece made in a certain Alpine country.
If you see somebody wearing a Rolex, is your only thought “that guy likes overspending on inaccurate timepieces” or “that guy enjoys old fashioned timekeeping technology”?