From the article:

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.

Do you know of any bovine or bovine predecessors capable of clearing a height suspiciously close to that of every rural cattle rancher's barbed wire fences? Me neither.

You're right, it was really weird to see structures (per your Google maps link) so clearly designed to facilitate the funneling of a stampeding wildlife, to whatever ends, and pretend like it was primarily a religious-driven construction. To be fair, eating a good steak is almost like a religious experience, personally, but maybe we should send the authors a copy of the Lion King so they can have an epiphany during the stampede scene(s). So yeh, I think you're 100% right: Very hungry people watching a stampede 10,000 years ago had the same epiphany. Whether they drove them into a dead-end wall, into pits, over cliffs, whatever, the architecture to funnel the herd is clearly there. Necessity (hangry) -> invention.

When I first saw these pics, I thought of the Nazca Lines. Even though they look similar from above, the Nazca lines are actually quite shallow trenches (~6" depth) dug into the landscape. And they're clearly more artistic and less/not functional, so I think I agree that the Nazca people were religiously motivated.

What a weird take on "definitely not cattle ranching" from Hugh Thomas et al., though.