History of Ancient Human Sleep In this sleep research, they found that the people went to sleep about 3.5 hours after sunset, challenging the idea that staying awake later may result from modern technology. The average sleep duration was 6.25 hours, with the subjects sleeping less during summer and more in winter.
If you're feeling sleep deprived, you might not be able to blame it on modern society. A study of hunter-gatherer societies suggests that our prehistoric ancestors slept for about the same number of hours we do today.
Samson's data suggest that the sleep of our hunter-gatherer forebears was flexible; they likely slept during both the day and night and took frequent naps. This approach to sleep may have enabled the migration of H. sapiens out of Africa and into regions with shorter winter days.
They stay up late into the evening, average less than 6 1/2 hours of sleep and rarely nap.
What these scientists found was that despite their geographic and cultural differences, there was a pattern among all three groups: They were relatively healthy and they got only 6.4 hours of sleep on average a day (ranging from 5.7 to 7.1 hours per night), sleeping another hour more in the winter.
It was common practice in some populations to have “two sleep periods”; you could have the first snooze during the day and the second at night. Or have the first from evening to midnight, and the second from the earlier morning hours to daybreak.
For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning.
History of Ancient Human Sleep
In this sleep research, they found that the people went to sleep about 3.5 hours after sunset, challenging the idea that staying awake later may result from modern technology. The average sleep duration was 6.25 hours, with the subjects sleeping less during summer and more in winter.
Homo sapiens are the only species that deliberately deprives itself of sleep; all other mammals sleep at multiple points during the day when their bodies urge them to. Infants nap vigorously, which confirms that a bit of sleep during the day is perfectly natural - and necessary - for humans.
Our prehistoric ancestors knew a crying baby could attract predators, so babies were held close, sleeping with their mothers and nursing on demand.
When the first humans migrated to northern climates about 45,000 years ago, they devised rudimentary clothing to protect themselves from the cold. They draped themselves with loose-fitting hides that doubled as sleeping bags, baby carriers and hand protection for chiseling stone.
For starters, cavemen didn't get bored. There was just too much work to do, too much of a thrill in hunting down prey, too much of a dopamine rush when eating a juicy fruit, to ever be bored. The jungle was a dangerous place, but it was undeniably very interesting.
Well, not a bed exactly, but more like a mattress made of grass. What Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of Witswatersrand, found were mats of grass and sedge piled half an inch thick on the floor of a cavelike rock shelter in South Africa. The oldest bedding is 77,000 years old.
The only buildings that would probably still stand even after 1 thousand years are those made of stone. The first day after people went to sleep, most power plants would shut down, cutting off electricity worldwide. Only Times Square and Las Vegas would still have light for a few more days.
Our ancestors may have compressed their sleep into a shorter period because they had more important things to do in the evenings than rest.
When the experiment ended, Gardner had been awake for 264 hours and 25 minutes. He then had 14 hours of sleep before waking up to use the bathroom. We have no verified examples of anyone staying awake longer than Gardner, and we still don't know for sure how long human beings can survive without sleep.
In general, though, people should aim to fall asleep a few hours after dark and wake up within the first hours of sunlight in the morning, where possible. General guidelines indicate that the average adult needs about 7–9 hours of sleep each night.
Learning is an essential process of the human species, and sleep is essential to the consolidation of memories. Yet, it is not sleep, but rather sleep architecture that has co-evolved with learning and other recuperative processes to its present state, to optimize these processes for each species.
Sixty percent of four-year-olds still nap. However, by five years of age, most children no longer need naps, with less than 30% of children that age still taking them. The number decreases even more by age six, where less than 10% of children nap. Nearly all children stop napping by seven years of age.
Sleeping positions were also vastly different to what most people do today. Lying flat in bed was associated with death, so medieval people would sleep in a half upright position. Andrew Boorde even suggested that daytime naps should be taken standing up, and leaning against a wall.
The study carried out by Professor Ekirch from the University of Virginia, has revealed that ancient people used to sleep about 8 hours per night... but not all at once!
In Medieval societies, people generally slept for around four hours, then woke for a few hours to pray or socialise with their bed fellows, before going back to sleep – a practice that seems very alien to us nowadays.
But while researching nocturnal life in preindustrial Europe and America, he discovered the first evidence that many humans used to sleep in segments – a first sleep and second sleep with a break of a few hours in between to have sex, pray, eat, chat and take medicine.
They would go to bed around 9:00 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., sleep for three to four hours, and wake up after midnight for an hour or so. During that time they might pray, meditate, have sex, or even perform simple chores that didn't require much illumination or skill.
In the Victorian era the public would typically fall asleep at 7pm when the sun disappeared, however this dramatically moved to 10pm in the Edwardian era, finally settling at 12pm in the modern age. Although our bedtime has become later throughout the years, we've continued to wake up around a similar time.