Modern Indians and African native hunters sleep as much as we do, so our problem may not be so much chronic sleep deprivation as sleep quality.
You can often hear that modern urban life violates the natural biological rhythms of our body - primarily due to the fact that electric lighting allows us to ignore the coming night and stay awake, although according to all the physiological instructions we inherited from our ancestors, we should be asleep already. The emergence of smartphones, laptops and other gadgets only exacerbated the problem. We go to bed late, fall asleep poorly, and get up early. Due to chronic lack of sleep, various diseases arise, not only neuropsychiatric, but also, for example, metabolic disorders.
Bushman holding a turtle shell with food in his hands
Photo Theo Allofs / Corbis
This implicitly implies that in the past, in the pre-industrial era, people slept longer. This, however, is questioned by anthropologists at the University of California, Los Angeles. How can one find out today about the way of life of former people, especially when it comes to prehistoric eras, from which there is no written evidence? You can turn to archeology and paleobiology, or you can go to Africa to the current tribes that continue to live by hunting and gathering - indeed, because their rhythm of life should have remained the same as that of our ancestors.
Jerome M. Siegel and his colleagues went to the "wild ethnic groups" of Africa and South America, taking with them gadgets that allow us to estimate how many people slept, how much they walked while not sleeping, how long the daylight hours lasted. These devices had to be worn around the clock on a belt for 28 days. The observation experiment was carried out with the Chimane Indians in Bolivia, the Hadza people in Tanzania and the Bushmen in Namibia.
In an article in Current Biology, the authors write that the Bushmen, Hadza, and Chimans spent 6.9 to 8.5 hours in bed, and actually spent 5.7-7.2 hours on sleep, in winter most of the volunteers slept an hour longer. They went to bed not at sunset, but 2.5–4.4 hours after, that is, when the air temperature dropped significantly, they got up right before dawn, when the temperature dropped to the daily minimum. Only the Bushmen slept for another hour after sunrise. None of the natives woke up at night (although it is believed that "natural people" sleep in two parts, waking up at night for a while). None of them suffered from insomnia, for which there was not even a word in their languages. And, importantly, none of them complained about lack of sleep, sleepiness during the day, or a desire to take a nap.
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It turns out that pre-industrial hunter-gatherers sleep as much as modern civilized people: a large-scale study conducted in 2002 by the American Cancer Society showed that most of us sleep an average of 6.5-7.5 hours. It is possible that our difference from pre-industrial people is not how much we sleep, but how we sleep. And the matter may be not only in whether we wake up at night or not, but in some deeper interaction of the organism and the environment during sleep. Temperature may be an important factor, the researchers believe, and it is possible that for a good sleep, we need to cool the air in the room, simulating the coolness of the night.
It is also worth clarifying that when they talk about the general medical consequences of improper sleep, they often mean not only and not so much its quantity as the circadian rhythm itself. You can spend the required number of hours on sleep, however, if you go to bed in the afternoon, then at night, then in the early morning, then in the early evening, the biological clock will become unusable, which will have a bad effect on your health.
Kirill Stasevich