Even Prehistoric People Didn’t Get Eight Hours Sleep A Night

Still, researchers say this doesn’t mean they got more sleep than we do.

The researchers found the hunter gatherers’ sleep patterns were to a certain extent similar to those of the West – getting an average of 5.7 to 7.1 hours’ sleep a night.

What do they know how much our ancestors slept? In contrast, sleep typically continues well after sunrise in industrial populations.

‘But now, for the first time, we are showing that’s not true’.

The researchers noted that chronic insomnia was essentially unknown in those traditional societies. A few of the tribes did not even have a word in their vocabulary to name the sleep disorder. This may suggest an active lifestyle can help prevent insomnia.

In America, it seems only unicorns get seven or eight hours of sleep a night, and the rest of us suffer. The authors only studied sleep patterns. Generally, 7-8 hours of sleep is recommended by health experts for good health.

What is more, it is a myth that modern living is robbing us of precious time in bed.

What kind of research was this? This all could contribute to why hunter-gatherers’ sleep less than we do on average, Gurubhagavatula says. But according to new research, modern life has done nothing to rob us of sleep, despite the invention of the electric lightbulb, the TV, the internet, smartphones and social media.

The authors state this may have health implications.

In these societies, electricity and its associated lighting and entertainment distractions are absent, as are cooling and heating systems.

On most nights, members of three hunter-gatherer groups – the Hadza of Tanzania, the Ju/’hoansi San of Namibia and the Tsimane of Bolivia – sleep 5.7 to 7.1 hours, Siegel and colleagues report online October 15 in Current Biology.

What did the research involve? The participants would sleep when temperature was falling during the night, but when it hit bottom, they woke up; Siegel found this “quite surprising”.

And rather than light being the catalyst for sleep, it appears ambient temperature plays a key role.

“I think this paper is going to transform the field of sleep”. They stayed awake, on average, just more than three hours after sunset and slept during the coolest part of the night. Far from exceeding those of a modern city-dweller, these values are near the low end of the range found in industrial societies.

On average, people slept an hour more in winter time than summer.

They fall asleep no less than three hours after sundown and most wake up after the sun has already risen, contradictory to the common belief that in preindustrial societies people woke up before the sunrise.

The data from the San in Namibia, for instance, shows no afternoon naps during 210 days of recording in the winter and 10 naps in 364 days in the summer.

How did the researchers interpret the results?

These groups are isolated, without the shine of streetlights or the glow of computer screens that many people blame for sleeping problems.

One recent history suggested that humans evolved to sleep in two shifts, a practice chronicled in early European documents. Maybe we are not created to have this type of sleep habit.

Nevertheless, Dr. Siegel added that not the net duration is what really makes us feel fresh in the morning, but the quality of our sleep.

“There’s no question that light affects sleep”, he said.

“Sleep occurs nearly entirely during the dark period in these traditional societies”.

“They are sleeping through the coldest period of the night”, he says.

Relation of sleep to ambient temperature and skin temperature.

You’ve heard of the Paleo diet, but the next big thing in health may well be the Paleo sleep schedule.