Consider further back in the past, even before any kind of remote electrical communications, and even before the Pony Express and letters were possible because writing was invented. As you consider each iteration of the world that existed prior to the present, you discover greater freedom as communication of edicts from rulers was less possible.
The advent of recorded speech was a clinal boundary, because our brains are evolved to acculturate us, and can't natively differentiate between fictional speech and natural speech of our neighbors. Hearing speech informs us culturally. Visual presentations of people further created acculturation to fictional society. Such fictional presentations have always been created by Priests and Shamans, but were limited to local iterations prior to mass communication. The Catholic Church and Islam were evolutions of this acculturation that sought to become universal, global phenomena.
The more immersive such representations become, the more we are acculturated to fictional society. We are today trained to live in culture that includes extraordinary powers and strange beings riding flying turtles and laying waste to ancient civilizations to attain to magical boons.
How can trapping rabbits to consume their corpse compare? The extinction of the megafauna and end of the ability to create ~4k meals of ~4kcal each with one kill destroyed a way of life, an ease of production of wealth we can hardly even imagine today, about ~13kya. But even then people walked around imagining the fictional reality their shamans created, that enabled their local society to prosper IRL. The fiction we immerse ourselves in through watching TV or playing games is entrained and our real world cultures reflect our fictional acculturation.