[zdw]

I don't have a primary source, but have seen articles similar to these links that mentions the toy to religious object classification overlap (with almost the same pull quote):

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-toys-kids-archae...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220816-the-worlds-oldes...

There's a lot of guesswork involved in the field, I would think?