(at around 1h 10 mins) The film includes a glimpse of a map showing Atlantis off the coast of Spain. It's a reference to Plato's theory that the construction techniques used in Egypt were imported from the ancient lost civilization of Atlantis. This would be the second time that director Roland Emmerich makes this suggestion, as in his previous film Stargate (1994), someone jokingly asked whether "men from Atlantis" were responsible for the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
This film features some alleged historical controversies, including the construction of the Great Pyramid 12,500 years ago (almost 8,000 years earlier than the egyptologists estimate), the existence of the Ben-Ben stone (the pyramid-shaped stone missing from the top of the Khufu Pyramid/the Great Pyramid), the correlation between the position of the pyramids and the stars from the Orion constellation (associated by the ancient Egyptians with the god Osiris), the Sphinx (originally being a statue of a lion) allegedly correlated with the Leo constellation rising from the East on the day of the Vernal (Spring) Equinox (when at the same time Orion is in conjunction with the Giza pyramid complex thus what's on Earth is mirroring the stars in the sky to commemorate the time of the construction), and the possible nonhuman origins of the first kings of Egypt.
D'Leh refers to one star as "the one that never moves." That would be the North Star, which appears stationary in the northern night sky. In 10,000 BC, the North Star was Vega, the fifth brightest star in the sky, which have been very obvious in the dark sky. The North Star was also used as a symbol of steadiness in director Roland Emmerich's movie Der Patriot (2000), although it was the star Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris) rather than Vega.
D'Leh is "Held", the German word for "hero", backwards. Roland Emmerich chose the name as an Easter egg.
(at around 40 mins) The computer-generated wet saber-tooth tiger was created by Double Negative. Creating it required combining several of the most challenging elements of visual effects: fur, wet fur, water, and creature animation.