This has reminded me of,
(My emphasis.)
Interesting approach, the 'cognitive' one. Angel = hidden mechanism that people (especially in ancient times) indulged in very often --anthropomorphisation of just about everything they didn't understand.
I value this approach. I wish I understood it better. I rather lean towards the archaeological/historical perspective,* which is the direction in which I've tried --unsuccessfully, I have to say-- to bring the discussion. To me, the closest we can get to understanding how or why these old timers came up with this angel stuff, is by digging under the ground and then thinking rationally about what their possible motivations must have been.
The fact that these intermediaries between people and the gods had wings --Sumer, Akkad, Babylon's cherubim-- does not surprise me at all. Birds appear as symbols of deities as far back as Gobekli Tepe --end of the last glacial period ca. 11000 years ago. In other early human settlements birds also appear depicted as taking the decapitated bodies of the dead. The bird appears strongly in Egypt too. It must have symbolised a connection between the living and the dead for obvious reasons. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, it's vultures we're talking about. Now, it doesn't take a long stretch of the imagination to conjecture a possible reason why people believed that vultures were sacred beings in charge of helping the transit of the deceased to the netherworld. One small step, I think, takes the average Bronze-Age sophisticated mind from different kinds of birds to different kinds of angels.
* They're not mutually exclusive, of course.