Joe summed it up really well. I would however like to highlight the point he made about the Roman military taking on slingers of many cultures - we are never, to the best of my limited knowledge, told about a standardized sling being a part of Roman soldier kit. We know so much about the standard ancient Roman soldier kit, but a sling is never mentioned except as being a weapon useful to soldiers. And look at all of us here - we're a weird mismatched bunch of slingers, each with our own preferences. I love short and chunky Balearic style slings to lob stones of about a libra in weight, but there are slingers that use long noodly slings and quail egg sized stones. I'm no better or worse for using such a sling, and I'm sure we'd be formidable if all of us were put together - at least one of us would be bound to hit an enemy

So much of slinging boils down to preference, and I'm sure that's been the case for millennia. Different fibers, different styles, different grips, different weights, and even different stone/bullet size preferences. I don't doubt that the slings used to throw the ~45g lead bullets of antiquity would be very different from the slings used to lob stones weighing a libra. And even then, I would say that in whatever Roman-occupied region the soldiers were recruited from, they would likely use the slings they were familiar with, and modify them or otherwise to make them work with the ubiquitous sling bullets of that era. So, in summary: a Roman soldier could perhaps have seen and/or used styles of slings like yours