I was just about to comment how this brings a whole new meaning to that old esoteric adage. This entire thread is so compelling. It really does seem like many/most of these structures have been revealed from the rock around it, not carved into/out of it.
I'm not 100% these structures were dug out to escape anything. What if the people that originally found or revealed them just happened upon them, and maybe the curious, powerful ruler of that time was interested and had a lot more of the structure dug out? I wonder if our ancients were merely curious about what happened to *their* ancients so when they find these structures they revealed more of and subsequently ended up using them out of pure human curiosity. If you were a simple cave man intelligence, seeing those angles and smooth edges in the ground would still pique curiosity- even more so if your overall intelligence was higher or more civilized than that of a cave man.
Could civilization as we know it be destroyed/reset by catastrophe (natural or artificial) way more often than science would have us know, and these giant stone and/or petrified cities we have in the ground are just going to be further below our layer of steel/plastic cities? If there's any credence to the bit of mainstream geology with tectonic plates, the mantel and crust of the earth, could subduction zones just be a way to recycle these layers of matter- albeit slowly even on a geological scale- indefinitely?
Is the cover-up simply the fact that we have no clue why we are here, and no clue what those before us were here, and those before them- not generation-wise, but civilization-as-we-know-it-wise? I mean, I'm sure there are mysterious, unknown, and hidden technologies/powers but I'm starting to feel like those facts or lackthereof and the inconsistencies we notice are only the tip of the iceberg. That being said, who would be these initiates that are covering things from us profane- that is if civilization as we know it is reset, what about these people in-the-know?
I wish I had more to offer than conjecture here, all of these photos and points on the thread have been great.