14 DAY TRIAL // Growing up in prehistoric times, our ancestors didn't have hit TV shows or the Internet to keep them up at night. Still, researchers say this doesn't mean they got more sleep than we do.
Rather, it looks like we humans have been averaging a measly 6.5 hours a night, coupled with a short nap every now and again, for ages now.
This goes against commonly held assumptions that modern life has greatly reduced our sleep and that this is why many of us often feel exhausted.
It is, however, somewhat comforting to know that, millions of years ago, our forefathers didn't exactly sleep to their heart's desire either. Au contraire, odds are they too often felt tired.
“The argument has always been that modern life has reduced our sleep time below the amount our ancestors got, but our data indicates that this is a myth,” said researcher Jerome Siegel.
“I feel a lot less insecure about my own sleep habits after having found the trends we see here,” added specialist Gandhi Yetish, as cited by Phys Org.
How do they know how much our ancestors slept?
Obviously, what with our ancestors being long gone, the researchers couldn't simply go around stalking a few to learn about their sleeping habits.
What they did instead was study traditional peoples in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia, whose lifestyle much more closely resembles that of our forefathers than our modern routines.
They found that even without gadgets and gizmos to keep them busy for hours on end, they still only got about 6.5 hours of sleep a day and very rarely took naps.
The team studied 94 adults over a total of 1,165 days. Even though foraging and hunting were their chief preoccupations, they still stayed up for over 3 hours after sunset.
Interestingly, the researchers say they would usually wake up when night temperatures dropped to their lowest, signaling that morning was near.
Although not getting the supposedly recommended 8 hours of sleep a day, they didn't suffer from obesity, atherosclerosis or other of the many diseases that plague us.
This suggests that, contrary to what some might assume, perhaps the human body doesn't really need 8 hours of sleep each day after all and can easily do with just under 7.
“There's this expectation that we should all be sleeping 8 or 9 hours a night and that if you took away modern technology people would be sleeping more, but now for the first time we're showing that's not true,” researcher Gandhi Yetish commented on the outcome of this study.