What Did Ancient Humans Do All Night?

What Did Ancient Humans Actually Do at Night? #HumanHistory #SleepScience #Evolution It’s 3:12 a.m. You’re awake for no reason, your phone is face-down, and your brain is replaying something you said in 2019. Here’s the strange part: for a long stretch of human history, waking up in the middle of the night wasn’t insomnia. It was the schedule. In this video, we dig into what the night really looked like before electricity. A lab experiment where healthy volunteers’ sleep split in two all on its own. Centuries of diaries mentioning a “first sleep” and a “second sleep.” A million-year-old fire deep inside a South African cave. Campfire conversations that turned into humanity’s first storytelling. A hunter-gatherer camp where everyone was asleep at the same time for only 18 minutes. And then the twist: modern groups living without electricity who don’t split their sleep at all. The honest answer is that there was never one ancient way to spend the night. The only truly new part is the panic. In this video: ▸ The “8 glorious hours” myth ▸ The experiment that gave people 14 hours of darkness ▸ First sleep, second sleep, and what people did in between ▸ Wonderwerk Cave and the fire that stretched the day ▸ What people talked about around the campfire ▸ The poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis ▸ The twist: hunter-gatherers who sleep less than you ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ RESEARCH & SOURCES ▸ Wehr, T. A. (1992). In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic. Journal of Sleep Research. 14 hours of darkness a night, and sleep split into two blocks. ▸ Ekirch, A. R. (2001). Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles. American Historical Review. “First sleep” and “second sleep” in diaries, court records and medical texts. ▸ Ekirch, A. R. (2005). At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. W. W. Norton. The expanded history of segmented sleep and night-time life. ▸ Berna, F. et al. (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. PNAS. Burnt grass, leaves and bone about 1 million years old, deep inside the cave. ▸ Wiessner, P. W. (2014). Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. PNAS. 174 conversations: daytime talk was economics and gossip, night-time talk was stories. ▸ Samson, D. R. et al. (2017). Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Only 18 minutes in 220+ hours when every adult was asleep at once. ▸ Yetish, G., Siegel, J. M. et al. (2015). Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies. Current Biology. The Hadza, San and Tsimane: no split sleep, about 6.4 hours a night, and no word for insomnia. ▸ Steger, B. (2003). Negotiating sleep patterns in Japan. In B. Steger & L. Brunt (Eds.), Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West. RoutledgeCurzon. No sign of first and second sleep in Japan. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ PEOPLE & PLACES MENTIONED ▸ Thomas Wehr, psychiatrist, National Institute of Mental Health ▸ Roger Ekirch, historian, Virginia Tech ▸ Laurent Joubert, 16th-century French physician ▸ Francesco Berna, archaeologist ▸ Polly Wiessner, anthropologist ▸ David Samson, anthropologist ▸ Jerome Siegel, sleep scientist, UCLA ▸ Brigitte Steger, Japanese studies scholar, University of Cambridge ▸ Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa) ▸ The Ju/’hoan Bushmen (southern Africa), the Hadza (Tanzania), the San (Namibia) and the Tsimane (Bolivia) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ If this video kept you awake, congratulations, you’re being historically accurate. Subscribe to Whyman and I’ll keep you company during the intermission. Whyman — asking why humans are like this. #AncientHumans #SleepScience #HumanHistory #FirstSleep #Anthropology #Evolution #Whyman