I really like wondering about the lives of the ancient people/tribes/Middle Ages and point out the scarcity of what school have taught us about them.

They sounded all-grand or all-simple, but it's a mixture of the two. That is why I like watching movies that depict lives of such kind of things; I am able to have an idea about how they live far better than what I have learned from school & books.

It's just that, they lived better: in terms of resourcefulness, perseverance and strength; and worse: in terms of unsanitary, uneducated, and extremely simple life. There are simple people who care about value, and there are those people who merely lives in greed. In that perspective, what was before and what is current are the same. Just modernistic, cleaner, educated---well, for most of us, but extremely not for the unfortunate. The surroundings and way of life may have changed, but the status and problem of every place of every era haven't.