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: 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?