Why Sleep Didn’t Kill Our Ancestors: The Evolutionary Science of Human Sleep

Prehistoric human sleeping at night representing evolutionary sleep science and survival biology

Early humans slept just 6.4 hours per night on average, in two bouts, with individual sleep timing staggered across the group so that all adults were simultaneously unconscious for only 18 minutes per night. Read the evolutionary biology of sleep timing, predator evasion, and why unconsciousness survived selection pressure.