At first I dreaded having to investigate the history of sleep. Human slumber appeared impervious to time and place, stubbornly immune to the element of change animating most works of history. My own ...

Can knowledge of how our ancestors slept truly lead us to a life of more natural—and healthy —sleeping patterns? Authors on the Internet have been exploring that possibility, writing a spate of recent ...

For most people alive today, a “good night’s sleep” means roughly eight uninterrupted hours in a dark room, followed by a single morning wake-up. Yet historical evidence suggests that this pattern is ...

When you were younger, you were told that getting eight hours of sleep was the goal. It could have been a parent, a physician ...

In our modern world of constant illumination and 24/7 schedules, most of us aim for a single, uninterrupted block of sleep each night. But for much of human history, our ancestors followed a ...