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you make some good points, imo.

what i don't get is why so many people need to find historical "evidence" - which, barring a sustained lineage of accurate, non-agenda-driven storytelling amongs folks that trust each other, can only be provided by authorities proclaiming interpretations of the unknowable as fact - to support their worldview in the now.

all the niceties and comforts that civilization provides have left too many humans with no reason to connect directly with the rest of the natural world, to understand their immediate surroundings in terms of meeting their own needs. an unfortunate side effect of that is some folks use the time and energy that could be used to (re)create that connection and autonomy for creating their own narratives about the past in order to demonstrate how their ideology for moving forward is "correct".

i'm not saying anyone should ignore the past, only that the further back one attempts to look, the further they are from any real possible understanding of it. let's say i read about conditions for certain people during world war 2, and i read something else about conditions for certain people during the paleolithic, both written in the 21st century by assumedly reliable sources (whatever that means). the former could potentially be a modern equivalent of storytelling, with direct lineage to the lives and words of individuals from that time. the latter could never be more than conjecture, educated guessing, based on generations of interpretation and re-interpretation of "data" collected millenia after the humans in question actually lived. i'm not denying that there may be some "scientific" basis for their interpretations, or even that they might be relatively accurate. all i'm saying is it cannot possibly be known, yet people form their entire ideologies around that shit as if it was their bible.