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>the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep. And why wouldn't they? This is (presumably) the only kind of sleep they know.
Instead of going to Tanzania you could’ve asked a sleep scientist. Sleep length has no known correlation to brain size and is known for drastic within family variation. What’s more sleep has a high within species variation too, some sleepers can survive 4 hours, others need 8. Collectively we used to sleep 9 hours in the 20th century, but it appears shorter sleep is fine too. TLDR: no one has any idea why sleep length varies and he won’t find his answers in antrophological studies in Tanzania, though luck, buddy
> Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape, and are still arguably the most evolutionarily successful of the primates > humans are weird outliers—we’re the shortest sleeping primates, yet we pack in the most REM sleep relative to this short duration Isn't that sort of the point? Sleep is a detrimental necessity and the more efficient an organism is in needing less…
This feels like the key point to me. These societies follow their body and go to sleep when they are tried, while us in the west have to sleep at a specific time to fit our schedules.
> Some emerging research suggests Earth’s magnetism matters, as well. Being barefoot on the ground versus 30 stories high in a downtown skyscraper puts you in a completely different magnetic environment. Really? My instinctive reaction to this statement is that it's quackery. Would be very interested to see headlines appear about this if it's true.
This is a common, but poor framing of evolution. Remember: the only real rule with evolution is "did this evolutionary change mean they survived / reproduced more"? Evolution is not a local or global maxima solving function. I find this kind of attempt at interpreting selection common with engineers, programmers, etc.
>the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep. And why wouldn't they? This is (presumably) the only kind of sleep they know.
More fragmented sleep, with people talking in the night, etc. I guess that's different from the low, unnatural, rumbles of cars and aeroplanes the majority of people have to put up with.
I think people in HN (and in general) have to remember the central axes of evolution before digesting this kind of article. I've already seen comments like it's "odd that no species has ended up evolving a continuous maintenance system" and "sleep has a higher opportunity cost in humans" in this comments section. This is a common, but poor framing of evolution. Remember: the only real rule with evolution is "did this…