I try to think in ways that are based on evidence, and to not think in ways that don't have any evidence. When it comes to trying to understand the living things we see around us, we have many tools to examine and consider them with. From a casual glance we see that birds all have feathers. Unless we look closer, we might assume that all feathers are the same, but when we look closer we see that no two feathers on a bird are the same, that feathers on particular parts of birds, like the neck, or the wings, are similar. By making many observations someone could become an expert in bird feathers, so that if you find a feather on the ground and show it to them they might be able to tell you what kind of bird it came .from, and what part of the bird it grew on

This same technique of making a great many observations and noting patterns applies to all sorts of things. Japanese swords, WWII German Naval ships, monkey teeth, and etc. When you examine teeth from monkeys, and apes, and people you can see patterns in how many roots, cusps, and other features teeth have that suggest teeth started one way and gradually changed over time to end up the way they are now, for each of the different kind of primate you study the teeth of. This is a very useful specialty, because there is so much information you can learn from teeth, like what things eat, how old they were when they died, and you can sometimes tell very specifically what kind of creature had that tooth from little details. I read a study that tried to understand if hyenas, bears, and wolves, whose bones and teeth were found in Denisova cave, might have been responsible for bringing in fish, whose scales and bones were also found in the cave, and could not have walked up to the cave from the river where they lived.

By taking little samples of the plaque left on the animal teeth, and by studying the isotopes contained in different food sources in the area, comparing bones of animals with known diets to all these and many more different observations, they were able to show it was very unlikely that any of those animals brought fish into the cave, and that meant it was likely that the people who used to live in the cave did, which meant that fishing was part of how they lived. I thought that was a very interesting investigation that enabled learning things about people that lived many thousands of years ago, from a few scales in the ancient dirt.

When it comes to evolution, that generally describes how a kind of creature might change over time. I read 'The Beak of the Finch' by Stephen J. Gould, and he observed Finches during cycles of drought, and found that their beaks changed one way when the rains came, and another when there was a drought. Because the weather patterns were cyclical, the changes came and went as the weather patter cycled. This is a pretty strong argument for evolution, for living things changing to adapt to changing conditions. By examining DNA, we can literally compare a living thing with it's parents one gene at a time, and we can do this for creatures that breed quickly over many generations, and we can see exactly which genes change and how they change how fast, what causes what changes, and all sorts of things.

I have no doubt these kinds of changes happen, and that we can observe them, so I would say that I can support evolution as a theory to explain such changes in a changing world.
When you start looking at bones and making very careful observations, you can see how species in the fossil record evolve over time. It's not fair to say that people imagine these things. People make very careful observations, pool their knowledge and discuss the different ways to explain those observations. They don't just make up something. Maybe authors writing books to make money make up stories that entertain people who buy books that entertain them do just make things up, but paleontologists, palaeobotanists, archaeologists, and geologists study for years to learn how to understand what they can observe in their field, whether it's rocks, feathers, or teeth, and they get paid to make those observations and base their conclusions on factual evidence that others can examine theirselves, that support their arguments. Unless you do examine that evidence yourself, it's very unreasonable to make statements about what they say about their observations.

I try not to do that. I try to examine evidence, or the descriptions of evidence people that have examined it provide, and ascertain if their conclusions make sense based on evidence. Obviously I don't have a lab where I extract aDNA from fossils, so I have to consider the statements of those that do. They include sections on the methods they use to make their observations, and their published papers have been examined by experts in that field to ascertain if their methods and claims are sound. It would be pretty hard to get away with making stuff up in that kind of environment, but it does happen.

People fake evidence, because they want to lie and say different things than are able to be supported by factual evidence. Sometimes people pay them to come to certain conclusions, such as that a new medicine is effective, or isn't dangerous, so peer reviewers are important to catch such frauds, and other researchers can try to duplicate their results they report in papers, and discover their claims aren't able to be duplicated. There is a lot of this, but more in the pharmaceutical industry literature today than in archaeology.

I notice your caveman is wearing tailored clothes and eyeglasses, and living in a wood framed house. The evidence suggests he's not a caveman at all!

Thanks!