The sites the lore points to

Quarries, workers' villages, bakeries, tally marks and the papyrus diary of an overseer named Merer, found in 2013, document who built it and how. The Orion alignment argument of Bauval and Gilbert requires flipping the sky map and has not been accepted. The precision is real; so was the workforce.

The figures were made by removing dark surface stones to expose pale ground, a technique a small team can reproduce with stakes and cord in days. They are visible from surrounding hills, and their subjects, hummingbirds, monkeys, spiders, match Nazca pottery. Most archaeologists read them as ritual pathways tied to water.

The stones are volcanic andesite and sandstone, worked with harder hammerstones, sand abrasion and templates; the repeating H blocks show the tolerance you get from copying a master. Unfinished blocks on site show the process. The Tiwanaku also built the Akapana pyramid and irrigated fields for a city of tens of thousands.

The blocks are Roman, quarried a few hundred metres away on a downhill route, and German excavations in 2014 documented the quarry and the transport method: capstans, sledges and large crews, all within Roman engineering as described by Vitruvius. The largest block was left in the quarry because it was too big, which is not the record of a species with anti-gravity.

Spanish chroniclers watched the Inca move and fit stones of this kind. The fit comes from trial-and-error dressing with hammerstones and from scribing each block to its neighbour; tool marks and unfinished blocks survive. The Inca built the site within living memory of the conquest.

The site is the reason archaeologists revised their model of the Neolithic, not evidence against it. Excavation shows the pillars were quarried nearby, carved with flint tools, and raised by communities that gathered seasonally, with the labour of feasting-scale groups. It changes what hunter-gatherers were thought capable of; it does not require anyone else.

The 'Sirius B' details appear in the accounts of one French ethnographer, Marcel Griaule, and not in earlier or later fieldwork; the anthropologist Walter van Beek found no Dogon who knew them in the 1990s. Sirius B was discovered in 1862 and widely discussed in the 1920s, when European visitors and missionaries were in the region. The likeliest source of the knowledge is Europe.

The 'solar system' layout was proposed before Pluto's orbit was known and depends on choosing which structures count. Mica was used in Mesoamerica for its shine and was mined in Oaxaca; it insulates nothing here. The city was built by a Mesoamerican society that housed 100,000 people and traded across the region.

The panel is a palimpsest: Seti I's titles were carved, then plastered over and re-carved for Ramesses II. Where the plaster has fallen away, the two sets of hieroglyphs overlap and produce the 'machines'. Egyptologists can read both layers.

Read with Maya iconography, the lid shows Pakal falling into the jaws of the underworld along the World Tree, with the sky bird above and the sun on its path; every element has parallels on other Maya monuments. The 'rocket' reading requires turning the lid on its side and ignoring the glyphs that name the scene.

The Anunnaki are gods in the texts, and Assyriologists say Sitchin's readings of key words are wrong; 'Nibiru' names Jupiter or a crossing-point in the sky, not a planet on a long orbit. The king list's long reigns are a literary device, like the ages of the patriarchs in Genesis. Sumer is remarkable for inventing writing, not for hosting engineers.

The bluestone quarries in the Preseli Hills have been excavated, with tools and a loading platform dated to the right period; the stones weigh two to four tonnes and move on sledges. The solstice alignment is a single axis, achievable by anyone who watches the sun for a year. Nearby Durrington Walls housed the builders.