I didn’t see any mention in the article of this site being a solar/star calculator. But then it’s not inconceivable that ancient people, even hunter-gatherers would have been interesting in tracking the movement of heavens and not solely out of any kind of spiritual beliefs, but because keeping track of the seasons would have been very important to their survival especially if they were hunting animals that migrated with the seasons or gathering plants that bore fruit only during certain times of year.
It seems that would be a bit more important to people who had some form of real civilization, not people who chase down game to subsist.
Understand that by this time, hunting was a more organized, cooperative and sophisticated activity than just some hairy guy in a loin cloth running down an antelope on foot and clubbing it over the head with a big rock.
Art, or labor-intensive forms of worship cannot exist where every ounce of waking energy is need for mere survival. If they had the time and energy to create what is described, there is a lot of missing extenuating and necessary information that made it possible.
But art is very evident in cave paintings of people who were purely hunter-gatherers as was the evident need for self expression.
And ancient farming was also a very labor intensive activity. Imagine tilling by hand with simple tools, planting each and every seed by hand, weeding and harvesting without the aid of domesticated beasts of burden or wheeled carts.
With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Mr. Schmidt thinks the hilltop was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly 100 miles.
I think this is a fascinating and important find because it dates to the period when mankind was making the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers composed of closely related family clans and interacting with other clans and constructing the permanent gathering places that would one day become permanent settlements, villages, towns, cities and even suburban sprawl :),