Coastal civilization. Gulf basin. River valleys. Water = trade, food, transport. The best real estate on Earth is at sea level. Baalbek at 1,170m is the high-ground exception.
Younger Dryas impact. Every coastal city drowns. Survivors run HIGH. The trauma is civilizational — everyone who lived low died.
Göbekli Tepe (760m), Baalbek refuge (1,170m), Andes (2,400–3,700m). Build on hilltops. Not strategic — fear. Noah's Ark "lands" on Ararat (5,137m). The flood story ends at the highest point.
Generations pass. PTSD fades. It's cold up here. Rivers look nice. They come down. Göbekli Tepe buried. Settle in Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus valleys. The "cradles of civilization" — not origins, but where mountain people landed.
Pyramids everywhere. Quality drops with distance from source: Egypt (7/10), Mexico (5/10), Peru (4/10), Easter Island (2/10). North America: recipe lost, only shapes in dirt remain (Poverty Point, Cahokia).
Leaders find old structures. Put their names on them. Build ego monuments. The recipe is lost. All that remains is brute force and the memory of big stone.
Each map accumulates all previous paths. The story builds. If any path doesn't make sense geographically or chronologically — the theory has a hole.