How Did Ancient Humans Sleep With Mosquitoes Everywhere?

#ancienthistory #prehistory #mosquitoes Would you set your own bed on fire? 🔥 Around 77,000 years ago, people at Sibudu Cave in South Africa built beds from sedges, topped them with aromatic leaves that contain insect-killing compounds, and later burned the old bedding and started fresh. At Border Cave, grass bedding dating back roughly 200,000 years was laid over ash. So how did early humans really sleep beside mosquitoes? In this video: 🌿 what archaeologists found in the bedding, 🔥 what ash, smoke and burning could (and couldn't) have done, and 😴 why a Hadza sleep study suggests the strongest defense may have been the person staying awake beside you. Time stamps👇🏾 0:00 Would You Burn Your Bed? 0:31 Sleeping Where the Bugs Live 2:03 The Mattress Under the Ash 3:47 What the Bed Can't Prove 5:34 The Ones Who Stayed Awake 7:19 The Bedroom We Still Build 📚 SOURCES & REFERENCES 1. Wadley L, Sievers C, Bamford M, Goldberg P, Berna F, Miller C. (2011). Middle Stone Age bedding construction and settlement patterns at Sibudu, South Africa. Science 334(6061): 1388–1391. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1213317 2. Wadley L, Esteban I, de la Peña P, Wojcieszak M, Stratford D, Lennox S, d'Errico F, Rosso DE, Orange F, Backwell L, Sievers C. (2020). Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa. Science 369(6505): 863–866. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc7239 3. Samson DR, Crittenden AN, Mabulla IA, Mabulla AZP, Nunn CL. (2017). Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 284(1858): 20170967. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0967 4. Cardé RT. (2015). Multi-cue integration: how female mosquitoes locate a human host. Current Biology 25(18): R793–R795. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.07... 5. Dube FF, Tadesse K, Birgersson G, Seyoum E, Tekie H, Ignell R, Hill SR. (2011). Fresh, dried or smoked? Repellent properties of volatiles emitted from ethnomedicinal plant leaves against malaria and yellow fever vectors in Ethiopia. Malaria Journal 10: 375. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-10-375 6. Vernède R, van Meer MMM, Alpers MP. (1994). Smoke as a form of personal protection against mosquitos, a field study in Papua New Guinea. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 25(4): 771–775. (No DOI; free PDF) https://www.tm.mahidol.ac.th/seameo/1... 7. Rifkin RF. (2015). Ethnographic and experimental perspectives on the efficacy of red ochre as a mosquito repellent. South African Archaeological Bulletin 70(201): 64–75. (No DOI listed) 8. Rifkin RF, Dayet L, Queffelec A, Summers B, Lategan M, d'Errico F. (2015). Evaluating the photoprotective effects of ochre on human skin by in vivo SPF assessment: implications for human evolution, adaptation and dispersal. PLOS ONE 10(9): e0136090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- #ancienthistory #prehistory #humanevolution #archaeology #historyexplained #stoneage #ancienthumans #mosquitoes #southafrica #Explistory