What You Can Learn From Hunter-Gatherers' Sleeping Patterns

October 15, 2015 3:10 PM

Here’s the story that people like to tell about the way we sleep: Back in the day, we got more of it. Our eyes would shut when it got dark. We’d wake up for a few hours during the night instead of snoozing for a single long block. And we’d nap during the day. Then—minor key!—modernity ruined everything. Our busy working lives put an end to afternoon naps, while lightbulbs, TV screens, and smartphones shortened our natural slumber and made it more continuous. All of this is wrong, according to Jerome Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much like the Paleo diet, it’s based on unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans used to live.
posted by sciatrix (43 comments total)

You better not be trying to take naps from me, 'cause I will cut you, if I have the energy.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:54 PM on October 15, 2015 [28 favorites]

I was literally bemoaning to my partner three hours ago how unfair it was that modern society made us get up every morning whether we wanted to or not just so we could go and be worker bees for the State, man, and now you're telling me that our ancestors got up at 7am anyway? Dammit. (don't tell him, I'm still working to convince him that waking any time before 11am on a Sunday is unnatural)
posted by billiebee at 4:01 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

billiebee: "(don't tell him, I'm still working to convince him that waking any time before 11am on a Sunday is unnatural)"

But then how will you find time for All The Things!
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:10 PM on October 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Between this and the standing desks craze, I am getting VERY suspicious. First it's open-plan offices (but not for everybody, you notice), and next thing you know we're Pod Workers who aren't allowed to sleep until we've paid off our Corporate Debt.
posted by Celsius1414 at 4:11 PM on October 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

all three groups wake up before sunrise, in stark contrast to Westerners who typically rouse when it’s already light

Who are these "Westerners" living in such luxury and how do I become one?
posted by Panjandrum at 4:13 PM on October 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

Snark aside, I appreciate this work and all work that increases the complexity of the picture of our gatherer-hunter ancestors, even if it is necessarily extrapolated from modern groups. Anything that adds to the ability to confound people who say "Hunter-Gatherers did this, and therefore that is the natural way of human life!" is fine by me. People who press for simple narratives about more than 100,000 years of human history encompassing an uncountable number of groups spread across the entire globe are beyond obnoxious.
posted by Panjandrum at 4:17 PM on October 15, 2015 [48 favorites]

Anecdotally temperature is the surest way to wake me up. Too hot or too cold and I am alert.
posted by Monochrome at 4:18 PM on October 15, 2015

I was literally bemoaning to my partner three hours ago how unfair it was that modern society made us get up every morning whether we wanted to or not just so we could go and be worker bees for the State, man, and now you're telling me that our ancestors got up at 7am anyway?

That wooly mammoth isn't going to be spread to death by itself now, is it?
posted by Fizz at 4:20 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I had the impression that the sleep cycle theory was based not on hunter-gatherers but medieval people and assumptions embedded in writings of the time.
posted by Bringer Tom at 4:24 PM on October 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I am here to support naps
posted by poffin boffin at 4:26 PM on October 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

People back then didn't have pizza. The past was worse. The defense rests.
posted by jimmythefish at 4:27 PM on October 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

That wooly mammoth isn't going to be spread to death by itself now, is it?

I know you meant speared, but I love the idea of hunter gatherers chasing a herd of elephantine prey armed only with butter knives.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:28 PM on October 15, 2015 [55 favorites]

Well, I mean, modernity really did ruin everything.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:36 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Between this and the standing desks craze, I am getting VERY suspicious. First it's open-plan offices (but not for everybody, you notice), and next thing you know we're Pod Workers who aren't allowed to sleep until we've paid off our Corporate Debt.

Maybe in the future we will have to purchase the right to sleep from our employers in 6 or 15-minute increments. It could even be a fringe benefit for some employees, or part of a compensation package like cash-equity deals now. Sleeping without a sleep credit, or sleeping beyond the sleep credits you have, is theft from the company and added to your outstanding debt.

Of course you're always free to take out a sleep loan from the company store.
posted by Sangermaine at 4:54 PM on October 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

Maybe in the future we will have to purchase the right to sleep from our employers in 6 or 15-minute increments.

Don't ever say this again, lest they hear you and decide it's a good idea.
posted by briank at 4:57 PM on October 15, 2015 [24 favorites]

monetizing sleep is already a thing in sf because of course

disrupt naptime
posted by burgerrr at 5:08 PM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I love the idea of hunter gatherers chasing a herd of elephantine prey armed only with butter knives.

Not so much mammoths but definitely part of the hunter gatherer diet: I think you should tell everyone about the songs from a long ago era which are about hunter-gatherers making pâté from wildebeest.

Start spreading the gnus.
posted by ambrosen at 5:11 PM on October 15, 2015 [39 favorites]

Start spreading the gnus.

i'm beesting today ...
posted by pyramid termite at 5:17 PM on October 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

What I know about paleo sleeping: When I go backpacking, I eat dinner, I sit in front of the fire. I go, holy shit, I'm really sleepy, and when I look at my watch, it's like 8 p.m. Then I go to sleep, I wake up when it's light, and I go, wow, I slept great, and I look at my watch, and it's the crack of fucking dawn. And then I go, this never happens to me back at home, I wonder how I can feel like this all the time, and then my wife goes, you want to go on 10-mile hikes every day? And then I go, fuck that, I've got the Internet to read and Netflix to watch and then it hits me, so that's why I can never get to sleep...
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:19 PM on October 15, 2015 [62 favorites]

I know you meant speared, but I love the idea of hunter gatherers chasing a herd of elephantine prey armed only with butter knives.

Hmmm, I guess different assumptions let you read that sentence with different implications.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:26 PM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

the trick is to LIVE in a cave 10k away but keep all your STUFF in your regular house and you have to go back and forth every time you want to send an email.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:27 PM on October 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Oh man. That Doze startup is like uber and airbnb and all the rest of the socially irresponsible startups.

Instead of working to make the city better for everyone, you make it better for the rich and hope the poor magically dissapear.

One of my top criteria for judging a city is how safe I feel taking a nap in public.

According to the cop who kicked me out of the little public access redwood grove in the financial district it is illegal to sleep there. Now I can pay 120 USD a month to have a place for short naps in a building on Market St.

I have taken lovely naps in parks and medians all over Latin America, on benches in plazas and outside cafes in Mediterranean Europe, and used to take a daily nap between jobs in an old old graveyard in England.

When I am working close to a catholic church, I always check it out at lunchtime. Often they have really good nap spots. My last church nap was at the neogothic church in lower Pacific heights, in a confession booth. I hope I did not snore too much.

Sorry for the tangent, but this is important to me. Naps make me a better person and a better worker, and I think they should be a universal worker's right.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 5:34 PM on October 15, 2015 [50 favorites]

Having lived and worked in a handful of remote Pacific islands, there's an additional nuance that the researchers can look into: the effect of moonlight. The full moon gives off an amazing amount of light in the wilderness, and people in villages I've been to will stay up all night socializing. By contrast, when it's overcast and a new moon, and darker than dark, everyone really does go to sleep shortly after dusk.

By contrast, flies wake up with the sun, and love to land on warm things like your face, so even if we wanted to sleep in we couldn't because of those stupid bugs.
posted by kanewai at 5:39 PM on October 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

I have taken lovely naps in parks and medians all over Latin America, on benches in plazas and outside cafes in Mediterranean Europe, and used to take a daily nap between jobs in an old old graveyard in England.

YES, seriously. I've napped in public all over europe and literally the only time the police disturbed me was when the Guardia Civil wanted to tell me it was about to rain and I should nap under the overhang instead.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:52 PM on October 15, 2015 [33 favorites]

Having lived and worked in a handful of remote Pacific islands, there's an additional nuance that the researchers can look into: the effect of moonlight.

Moonlight keeps everyone up, and when you have extended periods of rain everyone naps (well, or gets it on).
posted by Dip Flash at 5:53 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

People who press for simple narratives about more than 100,000 years of human history encompassing an uncountable number of groups spread across the entire globe are beyond obnoxious.

help. help, i cannot favorite this enough
posted by aramaic at 5:58 PM on October 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

oh boy, sleep! that's where I'm a Neandertal! medieval peasant! Viking!
posted by mwhybark at 6:07 PM on October 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

What puns have I wrought....
posted by Fizz at 6:40 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I find that if I turn my chair away from the door and hold an important looking document in my hand, I can nap for sometimes as long as 30 minutes at work before somebody comes in to ask me a question they could have just as easily looked up themselves.
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:42 PM on October 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

I don't care what the studies say. I'm going to play Skyrim until 3am and then sleep until lunchtime the way my ancestors have done for thousands of years.
posted by um at 7:10 PM on October 15, 2015 [34 favorites]

So what about the Yanomami, because I definitely remember seeing a documentary about them that featured lots of hammock time-- I mean LOTS of hammock time, 2 or 3 naps a day.

My dentist thought I was sleeping too much because I sleep 8 hours a night in addition to a one hour nap. My doctor said, nope, perfectly normal, which is good because my family are big sleepers. My mom and my daughter both sleep 9 hours each night.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:48 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm about to go take a nap right now. In a few hours, I'll wake up so I can go to bed.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:09 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Start spreading the gnus."

Oh my heck he saved this pun in his pun hope folder, a lifetime, and his day has arrived. This is golden. I now have fur and butterknife synesthesia.
posted by Oyéah at 10:06 PM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

All of this talk of medieval napping makes me think: wouldn't it be great if there were just one episode of Game of Thrones where everyone just took a nap? Everyone. Yes, even Ramsay Bolton, because then he wouldn't be doing evil things. Brienne and Pod spooning. Dany curled up next to one of her dragons, little puffs of steam coming out of his nostrils. Tyrion tucked away in a corner hugging a bottle of wine.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:43 AM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

I would go to bed earlier if day drinking was more socially acceptable.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:22 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

The volunteers also slept continuously. They would toss and turn like everyone does, but they almost never woke up for a concerted window in the middle of the night. This contradicts a growing idea, popularized by historian Roger Ekirch, that sleeping in eight-hour chunks is a modern affectation.

It can still be a modern affectation. There's a lot of time between hunter-gatherer ancestors and the periods from which Ekirch has, IIRC, actual documents to support his claim.
posted by kenko at 8:21 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

From the article:

Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one. “The two-sleep pattern was probably due to humans migrating so far from the equator that they had long dark periods,” he says. “The long nights caused this pathological sleep pattern and the advent of electric lights and heating restored the primal one.”
posted by sciatrix at 8:46 AM on October 16, 2015

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

The loopy combination of serious shit and whimsicality is why I return to The Blue every day.
posted by rdone at 8:47 AM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

My mom and my daughter both sleep 9 hours each night.

Yeah, sleep is weird - I can get 7 hrs a night for the workweek and I'm fine, but come Friday, I must, must crash early (and it is a crash). Alternatively, I can get 9 hrs every night and I'm fine forever (but I get really hungry, ravenous, in the middle of the day). I cannot sleep 8 hrs.

I'm about to go take a nap right now. In a few hours, I'll wake up so I can go to bed.

Do you also leave the TV on, and if someone turns it off because you're snoring, do you wake up and exclaim 'Hey! I was watching that!'? Because if so, you're my Dad.
posted by eclectist at 9:21 AM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Keep in mind that modern hunter-gatherers are living on some of the most marginal-but-just-barely-productive land that's left in the world. Hunter-gatherers who lived in the prime areas of the world before they got taken over by agriculture may have had more time to nap, because they didn't have to put so much time and energy into gathering food.
posted by clawsoon at 11:02 AM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Here is a link to the actual paper by Siegel's group. There was an interesting talk on the data at this year's Sleep conference in Seattle.

As a sleep counselor and researcher I'm very interested in the numbers on napping and insomnia in non-westernized cultures. The seasonal pattern's of roughly 7% - 22% naps compared to the extremely low numbers of people who've experienced insomnia (1.5 - 2.5%) are fascinating. I don't know what to make of how the groups data partially conflicts with data / current theories on sleep extension (a catch all term for napping and staying in bed later/going to be earlier to compensate for sleep loss) as perpetuating agent for insomnia. Perhaps the suggestion here's that naps may play some normal role in daily human life, but are still likely to cause difficulty when taken by people with problematic sleep patterns.
posted by Jernau at 11:10 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would go to bed earlier if day drinking was more socially acceptable.

Join a sports team! Seriously. It is perfectly acceptable to have a couple beers after a long Saturday practice, even if said practice ends at 11 a.m.
posted by kanewai at 12:13 PM on October 16, 2015

The acceptability of day drinking is also one of my top criteria for judging a city.

In San Francisco I take my 2 year old to the park, and after 45 minutes at most I am miserable as fuck. It takes a real effort to spend the two hours that make my kid happy and tired. Usually my wife stays at home napping the first hour, then she comes to the park to take over and I go take a nap at home.

I just spent 3 weeks in Northern Italy with my sister, taking care of a 1 year old, a 2 year old and a 3 year old. Every single park and playground we went to had a espresso, alcohol and snacks bar either inside the park or just outside. With unlimited access to machiatos, panini and pirlos (just like a spritz but with Franciacorta bubbly wine instead of proseco (ordering a spritz in Brescia is the fastest way to ostracism), it is socially acceptable to start drinking pirlos by 11 a.m), and with the possibility of taking short naps, we were able to really enjoy 5 or 6 hours at the park at a time. You know how much fun it is to ride a see-saw, play catch and push a swing when you are buzzed, with a cocktail in one hand, surrounded by equally buzzed parents? Lots of fun is the answer.

The kids and the parents all got very good sleep those few weeks.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 2:29 PM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]