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

It is 3am and you are wide awake, doing the cruel math on how many hours are left, certain something in you is broken. But that middle of the night waking may be one of the oldest and most human things you do. For most of history people slept in two shifts, with a calm, wakeful hour in between and when scientists gave modern people long, dark, ancient nights, their sleep split in two on its own. Your insomnia might not be a malfunction at all. It might be an ancient rhythm colliding with electric light. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 3am, and the feeling that you're broken 2:16 Roger Ekirch and the mystery of "first sleep" 2:46 How people slept in two shifts 4:05 What people did in the wakeful hour 5:11 How electric light killed the two-sleep night 6:47 Thomas Wehr's experiment: ancient nights in a lab 8:19 The strange calm in the gap 10:49 Firelight and the birth of storytelling 13:06 The sentinel hypothesis 13:46 The Hadza and the guarded night 📚 SOURCES (selection) • Roger Ekirch — "At Day's Close" (2005), 500+ references to first & second sleep • Thomas Wehr (NIMH, early 1990s) — short-photoperiod sleep splits into two segments • Polly Wiessner (2014, PNAS) — firelit night talk among the Ju/'hoansi is mostly stories • Frederick Snyder — the sentinel hypothesis • Samson et al. (2017) — Hadza group sleep, near-continuous nighttime wakefulness #ancienthumans #sleep #anthropology #evolution #insomnia