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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: 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