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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @08:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @08:26AM (#461583)

    This may sound strange, but have you tried high doses if Vitamin D?

    That, and vitamin B injections really helped me.

    (2 digit UID but posting AC for Reasons)

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 03 2017, @05:57PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 03 2017, @05:57PM (#462505) Homepage Journal

    At this point I'd be willing to try waving a dead chicken over it.

    I got 2000 IU Vitamin D3, also some Vitamin B12. The article I read also recommends B5 but the drugstore didn't have any.

    I just took my first doses, I'll take more tonight at bedtime.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]