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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[Stratigraphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratigraphy), for one thing. Event A happened before Event B because evidence of Event A lie below evidence of Event B in the earth. You see no evidence of tools being used in Layer A, for example, and suddenly in Layer B you see evidence of stone and bone having been manually worked.
And you correlate evidence (using [dendrochronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology), for just one example out of [many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dating_methods)) to discover that stuff in a certain layer can be dated to a certain time.
If you’re asking how we can know that some written record is truthful. we can similarly look for corroborating evidence (physical evidence and other written records).
If someone says Rome burned, you can dig down and look for actual evidence of a great fire in Rome and you can use various dating methods to determine when and where within Rome that fire occurred. Likewise, you can look for evidence of flood, drought, famine, high or low temperatures, and so on.
No, we cannot be 100 percent certain that every historical claim is true. We cannot be sure everything in the news today actually happened the way people said it happened. People get things wrong and people lie for their own purposes. You judge the reliability of each claim accordingly, you look for corroborating evidence, and you try to determine the way things most likely happened.
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