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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:47PM
(Mainly posting to show appreciation to the poster for finding this interesting article. As much fun as the politics articles are, this kind of basic science article is the types of gems which appear too infrequently... and get few replies because the main comment is "huh, that's interesting.")
I wonder what the actual cause of the differences in sleep patterns is. If anything, apriori I would have thought that segregated sleep would be more likely in a society with electricity and cheap lighting (you can do more stuff at night) than a hunter-gathering society.
Also, I'm curious what all the pre-industrial societies do when not-sleeping after sunset. Is firelight/starlight/moonlight/etc really enough to do things? Well, apparently it is, but what kinds of stuff are they doing in that relatively dim environment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:00PM
> hunter-gathering
Hunting can be pretty good at night if the moon is right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:25PM
a society with electricity and cheap lighting (you can do more stuff at night)
Perhaps the bright lights inhibit the chances of returning to sleep, while in the absence of bright light it is easier to have extended periods of wakefulness and still maintain the ability to return to sleep.
(Score: 1) by charon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:41PM
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 01 2017, @05:55PM
Well, I don't know about you, but around my office the cause of the difference in sleep patterns is my boss's droning voice!
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:25AM
Story telling?