I heard that in nature, humans were getting up when the sun raises , does that mean that they were sleeping much longer on winter?
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From a survivalist standpoint, yes. The more you conserve energy in a cuddle puddle, the less energy you waste heating yourself and walking around in the winter. The days are longer when it’s warmer, and colder and shorter in the winter and your body has adapted to this reality over eons of evolution
It depends. Generally yes, but e.g. villagers often didn’t go to sleep at sunset because they still had work to do (e.g. repairing farm tools and clothing) so they slept longer but not from dusk till dawn.
Humans didn’t use to sleep all night. There were 2 sleeps.
[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep)
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People used to get up when the sun raises, but they went to sleep about 8 hours before that, so their sleep lasted about 8 hours.
People see well enough at night to do some tasks in the evening after sunset.
It didn’t depend on the night length.
For people living in the extreme North where the night can last less than 9 hours in summer, they have to block the sun in the evening to get to sleep. Those places are also very cold, so people moved there when we were able to not build home that keep the heat and can block the sun.
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Until the introduction of electric lights, it was quite common for people to sleep a few hours after sundown, wake up and take care of domestic work in the middle of the night, and then go back to sleep for a few hours before sunrise. I doubt they liked getting out of bed in the coldness of winter any more then than we do now, so they probably both slept slightly longer and had longer mid-night periods, both, during the longer nights of winter.
Yes. And in the North, they went to sleep around 6PM, awoke at midnight for a few hours and then went back to bed for Second Sleep. They would get up with the sun.
To a certain extent, those midnight walks could be more significant. Get up, rebuilt the fire, have some water, maybe turn over something getting smoked, etc. When night is 16 hours you need to maintain more things before daylight. Also there are plenty of reasons to get up before the sun and some people adjusted to that. Usually to hunt/fish animals active at dawn/dusk.
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