10 Weird Things Prehistoric Humans DId That We Dont

Описание: Roughly 300,000 years ago, long before the concept of a bedroom existed, long before anyone had invented a bed, a mattress, a pillow, or an alarm clock, prehistoric humans were sleeping in a pattern that would get a modern person referred to a sleep specialist within the first week.

They did not sleep for eight consecutive hours. The idea of a single long block of uninterrupted nighttime sleep, the thing your doctor tells you to protect and your phone reminds you to schedule, is not ancient. It is not natural. It is not even particularly old.

What prehistoric humans actually did was sleep twice per night with a period of wakefulness in between. Historians call this biphasic sleep. The first sleep began shortly after dark and lasted approximately four hours. Then the sleeper woke up. They were alert. They talked, they had sex, they tended fires, they lay quietly in the dark thinking about whatever it is that a mind without language as we know it thinks about. Then they slept again until dawn.

But here is where it becomes genuinely strange by modern standards. They also napped. Aggressively. Strategically. Without any social stigma whatsoever. Afternoon sleep, the kind that gets you judged in every modern office in the world, was simply part of the daily structure of prehistoric life. The body wanted rest. The body got rest. Nobody filed a complaint.