The advanced technology involved with creating beautifully carved, geometrical, cut and dressed blocks of hard stone, like granite and diorite, is always a wonder to behold. On the other hand we have to be careful not to label every example of advanced technology the work of a pre-dynastic lost civilisation. The skills to create such blocks were developed across thousands of years, with their final flowering on the Nile Valley during the Pyramid Age.

Having said this, I am convinced that the savant-like mindset of the Denisovans lingered among hybrid groups across countless generations, spreading into many parts of the ancient world. Their descendants crossed the Urals and Russian Steppe and headed south through the Caucasus into Anatolia, where they eventually controlled the construction of sites like Gobekli Tepe. The technology was then carried south through the Levant until it reached the Nile Valley as early as 8000 BCE. Here it rested at sites like Helwan, south of Cairo, for thousands of years until eventually it was used to create the earliest funerary structures. These, as I show in The Cygnus Key, contained huge megalithic blocks of tuff turn limestone as early as 3000 BC. The technology was in full flow, and the developments came quickly thereafter until the age of Imhotep and, finally, the kings of the Fourth Dynasty.

The greatest achievements of the Denisovan legacy are, IMO, the Great Pyramid and its neighbours. They are the end product of a line of transmission and ancestry that began as much as 40,000 years earlier in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.