The evidence file

THE REAL PLACES

Stolen Genesis was written to make you stop and check. Every site in the novel exists, and almost everything strange about each one is documented in the archaeological record. The fiction begins where the record falls silent. Coordinates below; go and stand in them.

Göbekli Tepe Teomancimit / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

37.2231° N, 38.9225° E · ŞANLIURFA, TÜRKİYE

Göbekli Tepe

In the novel

Michael Carter comes to Enclosure H as a disgraced consultant and finds a basalt pillar the site itself was built around: stone that predates the builders, humming at 112.3 hertz.

The record

Raised around 9600 BCE by people who had no farming, no pottery and no metal, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known monumental architecture on Earth, older than Stonehenge by some six thousand years. Its enclosures spent millennia entombed in sediment; how much of that burial was deliberate backfilling and how much natural slope collapse is still argued in the journals. Nobody disputes the stranger fact: the people who built it were not supposed to be able to.

The Sulawesi caves Sabjan Badio / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

4.98° S, 119.67° E · MAROS-PANGKEP, INDONESIA

The Sulawesi caves

In the novel

In a chamber beyond the tourist routes, Michael and Evelyn cut a sealed tablet from behind the oldest spiral of all, placed where only someone following the pattern would look.

The record

The limestone karsts of Maros-Pangkep hold hand stencils and painted scenes that rank among the oldest art known to humanity. In 2024, researchers redated a narrative hunting scene to more than 51,000 years old, which makes story-telling itself older than anyone had dared publish. People were leaving messages on these walls a thousand generations ago.

Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum xiquinhosilva / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

35.8697° N, 14.5064° E · PAOLA, MALTA

Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum

In the novel

Three chambers, one instrument. When Priya Patel’s protocol drives the Upper chamber, the Lower answers, and the tablet in Michael’s jacket answers back.

The record

Carved level by level into living rock from around 3600 BCE, the Hypogeum is the only known prehistoric underground temple in the world. Archaeoacoustic studies of its Oracle Room have measured strong resonance behaviour near 110 and 114 hertz, frequencies that researchers have found can measurably shift brain activity. The novel’s 112.3 sits inside that documented band. Visits are capped at eighty people a day; the chamber does the rest.

Newgrange Ceoil at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

53.6947° N, 6.4755° W · BOYNE VALLEY, IRELAND

Newgrange

In the novel

Site two of seven. The tone that stayed. Evelyn stands where the solstice light enters and understands the builders were not decorating, they were tuning.

The record

A passage tomb raised around 3200 BCE, older than the pyramids at Giza. At dawn on the winter solstice, a purpose-built roof-box admits a beam of light that travels the nineteen metre passage to the chamber floor. The entrance kerbstone, photographed here, carries the famous tri-spiral, cut five thousand years before anyone wrote down why.

Gavrinis Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

47.5728° N, 2.8983° W · GULF OF MORBIHAN, FRANCE

Gavrinis

In the novel

A tide-locked island cairn where a single, unrepeatable response in dense carved stone nearly breaks Priya’s model, until Evelyn realises difference is the design.

The record

Reachable only by boat, the Gavrinis cairn is the most richly decorated megalithic monument in Europe: nearly every slab of its passage is engraved edge to edge with arcs, waves and concentric motifs, around 3500 BCE. Generations of scholars have proposed meanings. None has stuck.

Rosslyn Chapel Thomas Duesing from San Antonio,… / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

55.8554° N, 3.1604° W · MIDLOTHIAN, SCOTLAND

Rosslyn Chapel

In the novel

The key was never hidden. It was kept, in a building so dense with carving that one more impossible symbol simply waited in plain sight for five hundred years.

The record

Founded in 1446 and never finished, Rosslyn carries one of the densest programmes of symbolic carving in Europe, from the Apprentice Pillar to motifs that have fed theories for centuries. The chapel keeps its secrets the honest way: by displaying all of them at once.

Glastonbury Tor Bill Boaden / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

51.1442° N, 2.6986° W · SOMERSET, ENGLAND

Glastonbury Tor

In the novel

Where the Twelve assemble when the chord finally sounds, on a hill that has collected myths the way other places collect rain.

The record

A natural hill reshaped by centuries of terracing, crowned by the roofless tower of St Michael. The Tor has been identified with Avalon since the Middle Ages and has been a site of pilgrimage far longer. Whatever you believe, people have been climbing it to look for something for at least a thousand years.

The Richat Structure NASA / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

21.1240° N, 11.4020° W · ADRAR PLATEAU, MAURITANIA

The Richat Structure

In the novel

The grave of Atlantis. Beneath Sector Three of the outermost ring, a drill bites into a chamber that has waited sixty thousand years for the right two people.

The record

A bullseye of concentric rock some forty kilometres across, visible from orbit, formed by the slow erosion of an uplifted geological dome. Its rings have made it the internet’s favourite candidate for Plato’s Atlantis; geology says dome, the proportions keep the argument alive. Astronauts use it as a landmark. The novel uses it as a door.

The pattern continues

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