Well, saying that Norte Chico gave the Ancient Egyptians a hand with skycrane techniques is pretty impossible. There's a wide gap between "we're not sure what the answer is" and "this wild theory is equally well-supported by the evidence."

I gave some details in another comment, but the shipbuilding technology simply didn't exist before around 700 or so to cross the Atlantic Ocean--not in Europe, nor in the Americas (It did exist in Asia, but the Polynesian expansion and experience strongly limits the space for Asian trans-Pacific contact). That creates a very strong prior against pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, one that requires more persuasive evidence than "I can interpret this as a New World relic in the Old World." The only theory that comes close to meeting that standard is the Polynesian contact theory.

The space of what is possible is overwhelmingly large, it frustrates me when "rationalism" means setting up these extreme categories of possible vs impossible, sane vs "crackpot", etc.

You say that with such certainty as if you were there.

All I’m saying is that a small bit of doubt is healthy.

Also it is a somewhat accepted opinion that Chinese and Polynesians may have travelled to and from the Americas, however, the evidence is inconclusive and they don't seem to have established long-term ties, so it's hard to say. Even more cultures may have discovered the Americas, such as Mali and Japan, but if they did, those expeditions were one-way

>> In the past year, Sun, a highly decorated scientist, has ignited a passionate online debate with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were not in any sense Chinese but actually migrants from Egypt. He conceived of this connection in the 1990s while performing radiometric dating of ancient Chinese bronzes; to his surprise, their chemical composition more closely resembled those of ancient Egyptian bronzes than native Chinese ores.