Ugh. Thanks for sharing? But

1) What makes them a "cult?" They piled the heads at one end. If you don't need to eat the head, you leave it there.

2) What makes them "monuments?" Ancient Arabians were using fish weirs 10,000 years ago and even the original paper points out that cattle weirs are a totally known thing:

The structures range in form from burial cairns, tower and ‘pendant’ tombs (Braemer et al. 2001; Guagnin et al. 2020), to megalithic features (Zarins 1979; Gebel 2019; Munoz et al. 2020), to monumental animal traps (‘kites’; Kennedy et al. 2015) and open-air structures (‘gates’; Kennedy 2017).

3) Why the speculation? They were built. They are older than Stonehenge. They're only worth discussing if they're new, suddenly? Scholarship hasn't been lacking on this one, despite what the authors may say; this stuff was known, documented and explored in 2009 and again in 2017 but hey - get some of that good old Orientalist cult-calling in there and you can puke it all over the Internet, I guess?

Look - these are structures about shoulder height to an auroch, built of rocks where there were rocks, arrayed in directions that you can naturally drive wild cattle. and there are a lot of them. Just poke around. They basically form a record of "traps that stopped working" as the locals and the local food negotiated their relationship.

Paul Kriwaczek pointed out in Babylon that while Babylon fell in 562 BC, Babylonian civilization lasted longer than the period between its falling and now. They just made the mistake of switching to papyrus 3000 years ago so what wasn't burned by the Achaemenids has long since decayed.

Which is more likely - that a bunch of hungry folx built traps and used them until they didn't work anymore, or a "cattle cult" scattered a thousand monuments haphazardly across the landscape?

Mustatils were built upon all primary bedrock lithologies within their ranges (Table 2) and in a variety of topographic positions (Figure 8). The structures exhibit neither preferential orientation towards cardinal points, nor to prominent local landforms. Instead, they are usually oriented according to local topography, which varies significantly depending on available landforms and bedrock geology. Where built on hillsides, mustatils were invariably oriented perpendicular to the slope (Figure 8B). Meanwhile, those constructed upon narrow sandstone mesas or ridgelines were usually oriented to take advantage of the longest available edge. There is no discernible reasoning underlying the seemingly random orientations of mustatils built on flat ground, as in much of the Harrat Khaybar lava field.

I find this stuff fascinating? But I just don't get why whenever a white archaeologist looks at a brown structure, he (always he) assumes it's related to some benighted religion. Cave paintings at Lascaux? Obviously bored artists. Dead cattle in a pen? Obviously religious.