How can hundreds and even thousands of years of history, which includes entire civilizations, discoveries and characters, so confidently be explained? Not all of it could have happened the way it’s being taught to modern society, right?
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Historians rarely actually write that they “know” things happened a certain way, their investigations and their conclusions are usually turned into something more certain than they intended when it gets reported by others. Sciences, including Historical Sciences always suffer from this sort of “telephone effect”. So, you are correct that it’s often the case that what Historians “know” gets taught a little differently to everyone else. That’s why it’s important to rely on multiple sources of information and to get good at recognizing what makes a good source of information. Text books from religious organizations, for example, tend to be terrible sources of information because they have a bias that tends to warp what Historians say into what their religious ideals want them to be. Text books from “cheap” educational sources also tend to be bad, this is because they often include information that hasn’t been verified with actual Historians, so they might include things like “Dinosaurs all had feathers” because it was said once by someone and they didn’t really bother to check it out. It costs money to verify facts, and so the more expensive encyclopedias are /generally/ more reliable because they spend more to verify their facts. Encyclopedia Britannica is expensive, and has a great reputation for accuracy. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is generally not considered a trustworthy source because verification of what it says doesn’t always happen. If Wikipedia says something, you should always cross-check with other sources before you believe it 100%.
In any case, where Historians themselves are very confident that they know something for sure, it is because they have lots of different sets of clues and evidences that all point to the same conclusion. For example, we know how many of the early Roman battles were fought and what strategies were employed and how the battles played out because many historians in that time period wrote about it. If only one historian had written about it, then it would be less certain because that historian might be biased. If only the winners wrote about it, that would also be less certain. However, if both the winners, the losers and several third parties wrote about it then you could compare all these sources and figure out how the battle actually happened. The Roman battles were fought in a time period when writing about big battles was fairly common, so there’s a good number of sources to work with and so we know pretty accurately what happened.
Another kind of clue involves physical evidence. The evidence of battles is pretty obvious, bones, weapons and such can stay in the ground for hundreds and even thousands of years, marking the spot where the battle happened. Historians can date the physical evidence through chemistry and by how it “looks”. Weapons and items can be dated by how they were forged or whether they look like other items from a certain period.
It does get harder to be certain when you go back further into history. Written history is pretty accurate going back about 2 or 3 thousand years because writing was wide-spread enough for multiple sources to exist. We know, for example, that the Torah (the Old Testament in the Bible), is at least 2700 years old because we have small scraps of ~~paper~~ clay with fragments of sentences from the Torah written on them and these have been dated to 2700 years ago. This does not, however, provide evidence that anything written in the Torah actually did happen because there are no other sources to compare with.
History going back to a time before writing is much, much harder to be certain about. The best evidences are physical items made of bone, metal or stone. Other sorts of things will have broken down over time and been lost, although we do have some mummies and samples of cloth from > 10k years ago that were preserved in ice and other “special” locations where such things get preserved naturally. Physical evidence like this can at least tell us if Humans have been in an area, and can even tell us a general time period through chemical dating. If we find physical evidences of a Human settlement, then we can find out the time period when it existed and using this information we can trace when people arrived in different regions and that can tell us how people spread out over time. We know, for example, that it is very likely that the first Humans came out of Africa and up through what it is now called Egypt until they came to the region we now call Iraq. We know this is fairly certain because *all* of the bone fragments older than 2 million years old come from places in Africa. All the bone fragments found outside Africa are all less than 2 million years old. If a bone fragment more than 2m years old were found outside Africa, it would change everything we know about Human history, but this hasn’t happened and we are constantly looking for them so we’re pretty confident that we’re right about Humans coming from Africa.
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