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Alamo-Girl to HiTech RedNeck: "Truly the "historical" sciences like anthropology, archeology, Egyptology and evolution biology are on much weaker ground than the hard sciences like physics and chemistry."

No, all of science is on "weak ground" if measured against some "ultimate reality" which we can only distantly imagine.
Today we see vague hints of it in such terms as "dark matter", "dark energy", "vibrating strings", "spooky actions at a distance", etc.
We have no clue what this is all about, but I will make you a 100% accurate prediction: the more science learns, the more it learns how much more it doesn't know.
As they say: the Universe is not only stranger than we image, it's stranger than we can imagine.

So science is simply a methodology for learning about stuff -- whether "hard" or "historical", science works with whatever data nature presents, and attempts to understand & explain it.

Alamo-Girl: " And so the historical sciences tell stories to fill in the gaps.
And some of those stories strain credulity."

The real problem here is that, let's call it "Hollywood", plus some anti-science propagandists (ahem) love, love, love to blur and distort the distinctions between confirmed scientific "facts", "hypotheses" and "theories".

Virtually everything our anti-evolutionists here complain loudest about (i.e., "abiogenesis") are simply hypotheses, not theories or facts.

I disagree. The hard sciences - including astrophysics, quantum physics, high energy particle physics, chemistry, etc. - are empirical and rigorous. Predictions must be confirmed and observations must accrue. Indeed, the more a theory withstands attempts to falsify it, the more confident we can be of the theory (Popper.) To them, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Conversely, the historical sciences - such as archeology, anthropology, Egyptology and evolution biology - deal with a historical record which is spotty at best and construct stories to explain the observations and the gaps between them. They cannot go back in time to see if the gadget they believe does A actually does A or something else. To them, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.