Experimental Archaeology is one of the most powerful tools in humanity's toolbox, because you can't know about some things until you try it for yourself.
And sometimes what you thought was the reason or purpose? Turns out to be a wild guess that was way off mark.
A lot, and I mean a lot of guesswork assigns ritualistic significance to archaeological finds (speaking of the objects, not any conclusions, here). "If it was important enough to bury with them, then it must have religious significance!" is a thought that sounds plausible, but a lot of what a person would need "in the next life" would be tools similar to what they used in this life. Making rope? Very important.
How important, you might ask?
Well, bushcrafters, survivalists, and so forth all have come to agree with what survivalist instructor Dave Canterbury calls "The 5Cs of Survival". These are the 5 tools you need to survive just about any situation (on land). They are: Cover (which starts with clothing, not just tarps, tents, etc), Cutting Tool (as sophisticated as steel, as simple as a sharp-edged stone), Combustion Device (matches, lighter, ferrorod, fresnel lens, magnifying lens, and any sort of friction or compression setup, such as a fire drill bow drill, and so forth), Container (for boiling and carrying water), and Cordage (threads, cords, ropes).
Cordage is absolutely a survival need. With it, you can tie things to your body, such as a gathering basket, wear a blanket as clothing, etc. You can tie up a tarp to serve as a rainfly. You can bundle together sticks to carry back to your camp for firewood. You can make netting for a fishing net, a net bag, a net basket, a hammock to sleep up off the ground where snakes and scorpions, etc, cannot get at you. You can lash together tripods for supporting the rain tarp or the hammock, and put together furniture to sit on, to process gathered materials on, and even a platform to build a fire on if the ground is too wet, or too dangerously peaty to build a fire. (It does require mud & stones for insulation, but it is doable! Some areas, you do NOT want to build a ground fire, because it'll lead to forest forest.)
In the modern era, we've come to rely heavily upon nails & screws, which thanks to industrialization are cheap and plentiful, but while we could also use wooden pegs and holes, it's difficult to drill the hole in a Stone Age setting. (Not impossible, just difficult and time-consuming.) Notching two sticks so they fit against each other a little more closely and then binding them with lashings--cordage!--is a valuable tool for constructing drying frames for preserving meat and plant-life, as well as crafting a nice chair to sit on. Cordage can be used to get your food high up off the ground, out of the reach of wild animals--a trick we still use to this day in bear country!
Cordage is incredibly useful, and absolutely, if our fellow humans from ages ago had invented a tool to aid in rope-making, you can absolutely bet they'd want to have a tool that helps them make evenly constructed rope that would be solid enough to be reliable. And they'd absolutely want this useful tool for making more consistently successful rope with them in the next life.
Why is it important to have well-made rope? If one strand in a ply of cordage is more tautly pulled than the others, then more of the load placed on that cordage will be placed on those specific fibers, while the other ply (2-ply, 3-ply, however many are involved) will not be taking up nearly as much of the load.
Cordage is only as strong as its weakest fibers, but that weakness can come not just from materials quality, but also from having too much stress applied to one set of fibers. A ropemaking tool like the one in the posts above absolutely will help even out the stresses applied to the fibers, redistributing the weight more evenly. After all, if one strand of a 3-ply cord is taking 80% of the weight and the other two are taking 10% of the weight each, then the moment that 80% snaps, the very abrupt shock of that part of the cord breaking will likely cause the other two to snap as well, because suddenly they're having to support 50% of the stress when the third section breaks. But if you can get all 3 cords close to each one sharing 33% of the weight, they have a lot more "cushion room" to share out the stresses involved.
Well-made cordage can save lives, whether it's keeping the parts of a hut lashed together, or a rope used to ascend and descent a cliff to go after honeycomb, or even just as the rotation string on a bow drill that is being used to start a friction fire that'll keep you warm and dry and scare off predators in the night.
Cordage is 100% a major survival tool, and well-made cordge will save your life. Badly made cordage won't.
