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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:27PM
Hey, maybe if this research is well enough recieved our doctors will stop prescribing medication for people with polyphasic sleep! [wikipedia.org] The historical record is full of references [bbc.com] to a sleep-wake-sleep pattern, which is assumed to be common knowledge when referenced (first sleep vs second sleep).
"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
Too bad we've forgotten all about this in the 20th century, so much so that we mistranslate historical documents and over-prescribe medicine to people exhibiting a normal sleep pattern.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:43PM
I was gonna comment about a natural habit to consider that things beyond our personal experience are odd and probably wrong, but there's been enough politics around here...
> "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Your sig bothers me every time, since he knew pretty damn well those are ellipses!
(or weird if you take the moon's gravity into account, and weirder in an heliocentric system)
Lost an opportunity to educate, the old man...
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:42PM
I was gonna comment about a natural habit to consider that things beyond our personal experience are odd and probably wrong, but there's been enough politics around here...
Yes, that's a very human tendency: "I don't do it, so it's odd/wrong if someone else does" sums up pretty much every culture clash in human history.
It's especially dangerous when the person thinking that has the habit of dispensing chemicals to "fix" the oddities.
Your sig bothers me every time, since he knew pretty damn well those are ellipses!
(or weird if you take the moon's gravity into account, and weirder in an heliocentric system)
Lost an opportunity to educate, the old man...
Hey, don't shoot the messenger
;)
You're right, of course. I choose to focus on his meaning that we really need to go back to manned exploration of celestial bodies; the ISS barely counts as leaving the planet (still in the gravity well, after all). I chalk up the simplification to him speaking to his audience - you gotta dumb it down for U.S. Senators to understand it
:P
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by charon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @11:35PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:34AM
There is research to suggest that that style of sleeping only sprang up after we started become more civilized (started being indoors to work rather than outside foraging or hunting all day) and that our actual evolutionary pattern is fully sleeping through the night. Though I don't have a clue how they decided how cave men slept. These researchers claim the sleep-wake-sleep researchers didn't go back far enough in history. No one claims the 15th century was a pinnacle of human health so cherry picking one thing they did and claiming it to be optimal deserves strong evidence. We can measures these types of things today. Where are the measurements?