Why Didn’t Ancient Humans Sleep Alone?

How did ancient humans make themselves vulnerable enough to sleep—and still get through the night? In this episode of Ancient Human, we follow archaeological evidence from Border Cave, Sibudu, Ohalo II, and Abric Romaní to reconstruct how prehistoric people prepared sleeping surfaces, organized living spaces, and created places where the human body could safely become inactive for hours. Then we compare those traces with Hadza sleep studies and modern sleep physiology to explore what may happen when several people sleep near one another: staggered sleep schedules, nighttime responsiveness, thermal regulation, caregiving, shared body heat—and the equally important problem of other people waking you up. The evidence suggests there was probably no single ancestral “bedroom” and no universal prehistoric sleeping arrangement. Different environments created different trade-offs. Grass bedding could separate the body from cold or dirty ground. Shelter could stabilize the local temperature. Sleeping near others could make care and nighttime responsiveness easier, while also adding movement, noise, and interrupted sleep. Archaeology can often show us that people prepared places to rest and incorporated sleep into organized domestic space. What it usually cannot recover is the most intimate part of the night: Who slept beside whom. Who woke first. Whether children were nearby. Or why one particular arrangement was chosen. What survives is not the sleeper. It is the environment people built around the moment they allowed themselves to stop paying attention to the world. Research & References: • Wadley et al. (2020), Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa, Science. • Wadley et al. (2011), Middle Stone Age bedding construction and settlement patterns at Sibudu, South Africa, Science. • Nadel et al. (2004), Stone Age hut in Israel yields world's oldest evidence of bedding, PNAS. • Vallverdú et al. (2010), Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups: Evidence from Abric Romaní Level N Combustion Activity Areas, Current Anthropology. • Samson et al. (2017), Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. • Tamaki et al. (2016), Night Watch in One Brain Hemisphere during Sleep Associated with the First-Night Effect in Humans, Current Biology. • Samson et al. (2017), The evolution of human sleep: Technological and cultural innovation associated with sleep-wake regulation among Hadza hunter-gatherers, Journal of Human Evolution. • Harding, Franks & Wisden (2020), Sleep and thermoregulation, Current Opinion in Physiology. • Crittenden et al. (2018), Infant co-sleeping patterns and maternal sleep quality among Hadza hunter-gatherers, Sleep Health. • Baddock et al. (2019), The influence of bed-sharing on infant physiology, breastfeeding and behaviour: A systematic review, Sleep Medicine Reviews. • Anderson (2000), Sleep-related behavioural adaptations in free-ranging anthropoid primates, Sleep Medicine Reviews. #AncientHuman #Prehistory #HumanEvolution