What Did Ancient Humans Do When They Couldn't Sleep?

It is three in the morning and you are awake. Not ill, not in pain. Just awake, in a house where everybody else is unconscious, feeling like something has gone wrong with you. For almost all of human history, nobody thought that was a problem. Not because they slept better than you. They slept less. On harder ground, with no mattress and no heating and animals outside. And in some of the communities researchers studied, there is no ordinary word for lying awake at night as an affliction. No term for the thing you were doing at three this morning. This is about why. Along the way: what the written record actually says about first sleep and second sleep, why that famous story does not describe ancient humans at all, what happened when researchers put activity monitors on three hunter-gatherer communities across three continents, and the twenty-night study in which the total time every single adult was asleep at once came to about eighteen minutes. Where the science is not settled, I say so. The sentinel hypothesis is a hypothesis, the eighteen-minute figure is one study of one community, and real insomnia has causes none of this touches. What time do your eyes open in the dark? Put the number in the comments before you get to the answer. #ancienthumans #sleep #insomnia #prehistory #humanhistory #anthropology #hunterGatherers #sleepscience #whyweSleep #history #curiosity #wrenlow