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.
Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. 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.”
That's controversial.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/15/modern-life-i...
https://priceonomics.com/the-search-for-the-paleo-sleep-sche...
In Japan there's a word that literally means "second sleep". 二度寝 (ni.do.ne)
It's a word still in common use today.
It simply refers to when you wake up in the morning but still feel tired or groggy so you sleep again.
I'm not convinced.
[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8924290322670217203...
The waking up and doing stuff in the black of night doesn't seem too farfetched, considering that in much of the world a large fraction of people do that nowadays. For a good fraction of the year in much of the world the duration of night is longer than the duration of sleep, so you've really don't have much choice about waking up and doing stuff in the blackness of night unless you just want to lie awake in bed waiting for dawn (or you went to bed late enough to sleep until it is getting light--but then you were awake in the blackness before going to sleep).
[1] we needed both parents for feeding logistics, although often it's not required.
Leaning on external help is unfortunately not a great option for us.
My second dropped off the second he was set down. We could pick him up and he'd wake up and be happy to be passed around - then he'd drop right off when we set him down again. The rest of my sons were more typical.
Personally I never slept well until they were post SIDS age.
> It took some time for their sleep to regulate, but by the fourth week, a distinct two-phase sleep pattern emerged. They slept first for 4 hours, then woke for 1 to 3 hours before falling into a second 4-hour sleep. This finding suggests bi-phasic sleep is a natural process with a biological basis.
Yes, a natural process for being in darkness 14 hours a day. I personally prefer to use electric light and be out of the dark ages.
With the increase in physical activity during Summer, two stage sleep seems more biologically useful in Winter anyway. In days of yore, what else was there to do during all that dark?
Yes, when they were toddlers.
(Is this news?)
One reason it will be difficult to restore natural sleep cycles is that life has become increasingly complex; we have exponentially more responsibilities than our ancestors had.
In short, we are unlikely have a couple more hours to add to our sleep periods.
I'm not really responsible for getting edible food, drinkable water, warmth, cover, shelter from the elements, protection from hostile animals or enemy humans.
I also don't have to actually make anything with my own hands.
So, yeah, indirectly I do some of these things by earning a salary, paying bills and buying stuff, but I not sure that the work I do day to day is much more complex or responsible than what an equivalent neolithic hunter gatherer would be doing.
I don't on a daily basis do things that could get me or my family members killed if I did them wrong.
Also a lot of what we consider primitive skills take a lot more art or technique than we appreciate. Flint tools look like they might take real skill do do well.
Do you drive?
You seem to be disregarding the countless unplanned for things that people assume aren't going to clutter up their lives.
A tiny, tiny portion of the things that consume meaningful time each week: trying to turn health insurance into usable medical care or getting any insurance to pay out filed claims - complex family finances such as tracking multiple credit cards to maintain a credit rating - tracking multiple income streams for tax purposes - shopping for clothes such as trying to figure out how to buy shoes online without scoring a pair that sat so long the soles won't hold, doing that again when they're out of stock, and again, and again - helping kids with homework, inc puzzling out unfamiliar educational methods that school districts change every few years - time spent commuting - time spent maintaining older vehicles - shuttling kids to and from activities - civic and community responsibilities - years of education followed by ongoing education and certifications in your field - every part of being self employed - caring for a family member who has profound, chronic disabilities - personal medical maintenance for a chronic condition - locating a product that that is suddenly not available because it's the only one that doesn't make your kid sick - taking pets to the vet - keeping the property up to keep the HOA off your back - suing the HOA when they're on your back anyway - fighting to get your street repaved - proving to Amazon your 7k box arrived empty - fixing your appliances - researching which appliances won't fall apart months after you buy them - pursuing an appliance warranty claim because your research didn't pan out - researching medical claims to see if changes to diet or sleep would reduce exhaustion - handling the aftermath of a traffic accident - protecting your family from surveillance capitalism - contacting your county about a traffic light issue - doing anything at all at the DMV - filing local, state and federal taxes - getting your car inspected - getting it inspected again after some arcane violation is spotted - fighting with ISP every month over bogus recurring charges - adopting out the kittens that appeared in your front garden - perusing a service connected disability when the VA lost your military records - documenting a bad neighbor - handling CPS when your bad neighbor figures out they can report you anonymously - handling the estate of a loved one who sucked at organization - putting your own post-death affairs in order - proving a SS disability claim - researching each political candidate and issue instead of party-line voting - being a payee - mental healthcare - handling the recurring fallout from someone else's MI - helping people move - helping someone who is elderly and lives alone - finding a new homeowner's policy when your insurer won't renew, doing that again next year, and the year after that....
Anyone could post a completely different list.
All of these time estimates go way up if you're poor, work two jobs and have $100 to cover $500 of need.
It's just so ludicrous to sit on your couch, eating takeout food, paid for either by social welfare or white-collar work (also done from your couch) and spitball "oh, our lives are just so complicated and hard now".
No, your life is stupidly easy now. That's probably a source of problems in-and-of itself, but that's another issue. You aren't worrying about starving to death, tracking prey through the forest, gathering enough roots to survive the winter, your children being eaten by wild predators, or jesus, the other thousand things your ancestors had to worry about on a day-to-day basis just to stay alive.
Pre-industrial (and pre-agricultural) life was more physically taxing and stressful, so they wanted to move on to something better and easier.
At least today you can just save up, move to the middle of nowhere and live exactly like they did 500+ years ago, but with much better safety. You can even add some modern tools without much expense.
But it probably gets boring real fast.
