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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the catch-some-zzzz's dept.

Hunter-gatherers and farming villagers who live in worlds without lightbulbs or thermostats sleep slightly less at night than smartphone-toting city slickers, researchers say.

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, people in societies without electricity do not sleep more than those in industrial societies like ours," says UCLA psychiatrist and sleep researcher Jerome Siegel, who was not involved in the new research.

Different patterns of slumber and wakefulness in each of these groups highlight the flexibility of human sleep — and also point to potential health dangers in how members of Western societies sleep, conclude evolutionary biologist David Samson of Duke University and colleagues. Compared with other primates, human evolution featured a shift toward sleeping more deeply over shorter time periods, providing more time for learning new skills and knowledge as cultures expanded, the researchers propose. Humans also evolved an ability to revise sleep schedules based on daily work schedules and environmental factors such as temperature.

Samson's team describes sleep patterns in 33 East African Hadza hunter-gatherers over a total of 393 days in a paper published online January 7 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The team's separate report on slumber among 21 rural farmers in Madagascar over 292 days will appear later this year in the American Journal of Human Biology.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:08PM (#461404)

    I see they even correlated it to moon phase; makes sense for rural living.

    I wonder how it correlates to tribe size. If at all, of course.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:02PM (#461451)

    I wonder how it correlates to tribe size. If at all, of course.

    I assure you, "it" does correlate to tribe size. Everything is correlated with everything else when it comes to biological activity.

  • (Score: 1) by qzm on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:12AM

    by qzm (3260) on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:12AM (#461511)

    'Hunter-gatherers and farming villagers who live in worlds without lightbulbs or thermostats sleep slightly less at night than smartphone-toting city slickers, researchers say.'
    Doh, perhaps thats because they have to actually spend all day doing the labor that keeps them alive?
    They have a short sleep when the day is hottest (wonder why that is.. cannot possibly imagine) also, and start again nice and early in the cool morning.

    No, its the lightbulbs, thats the ticket!

    ffs.