As Thomas Kuhn pointed out for the sciences, a crude explanation is better than no explanation. The explanations of universal dilemmas found in folklore are crude, but they answer the human need to feel that we know, as well as to reduce stress. The phrase human need to know' may sound vague, but that is just what humans have. The invalid concepts people held may have been untrue, but they satisfied our uniquely human curiosity. Non-human primates show a great deal of curiosity during their youth, but not very much later in life.
Humans show curiosity through their whole life.
This, and many fundamentally human features, have resulted from the evolutionary pattern known as neoteny, or the evolutionary retardation of the development of mental or physical features. The shut off' switch for curiosity which is present in non-human primates, is itself shut off in humans. When we evolved language, the same play that chimps, for instance, show only in their youth was applied to the new concepts which humans used their whole life. The need for explanations and understandings is part of our evolutionary heritage and it doesn't matter whether they are true or not. The reasons behind any given social sanction or taboo are almost never correctly understood by the people who observe it, and yet there is almost always a reason given.