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Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more likely to happen to have just the right thing for surprise challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who didn't care about special things, because by definition they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can solve the problem drastically more efficiently that everyone else.
This is a beautiful story, but I can draft an equally beautiful, completely contradictory[1] story about how prehistoric individuals that wasted time collecting cool but useless rocks were less likely to have just the right thing for surprise challenges, because they directed their efforts towards hoarding useless bling. [2]
Here's my explanation - and bear with me, here.
Some people collect weird things.
That trait sometimes does, and sometimes does not result in an evolutionary or cultural advantage.
Making definitive statements about where this set of weird things falls on the spectrum above is just blindly guessing in the dark.
[1] Which is why beautiful, hand-wavy stories that explain the behaviour of people tens of thousands of years dead are largely useless for understanding that behaviour.
[2] If I were given the choice between asking for help dealing with a surprise challenge, and my options were two people, one of whom I know collects Funko Pops, and the other one does not, knowing nothing else about those individuals, I'm not going to bias my selection towards the former.