I taught prehistory for a long time and got really tired of playing the, this is the first example of _______ game. It's fundamentally flawed unless you assume that we can ever know everything about anything, which is completely insane imnho. And it changed constantly for prehistoric artifacts which was awesome but super tiring.

Anyway I ended up feeling best introducing historical points in a minimal amount of implied context. "The people who wrote this textbook considered _______ to be the earliest major example of _______." or "As of 20XX this was considered to be the oldest known example of ______." etc.

I started to have a lot more luck with maintaining a positive productive engaged classroom conversation when I started doing that. And it let us dive into unstructured critiques of historical method and bias which was always a good way to run out of time in lectures.

Then I realized teaching couldn't support an adult human lifestyle and had to quit. I miss these kinds of discussions though. Always glad to see them on hn.