Chronotype Variation Drives Night-time Sentinel-like Behaviour in Hunter – gatherers

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Volume

284

Issue

1858

Abstract

Sleep is essential for survival, yet it also represents a time of extreme vulnerability to predation, hostile conspecifics and environmental dangers. To reduce the risks of sleeping, the sentinel hypothesis proposes that group-living animals share the task of vigilance during sleep, with some individuals sleeping while others are awake. To investigate sentinel-like behaviour in sleeping humans, we investigated activity patterns at night among Hadza hunter–gatherersof Tanzania. Using actigraphy, we discoveredthat all subjects were simultaneously scored as asleep for only 18 min in total over 20 days of observation, with a median of eight individuals awake throughout the nighttime period; thus, one or more individuals was awake (or in light stages of sleep) during 99.8% of sampled epochs between when the first person went to sleep and the last person awoke. We show that this asynchrony in activity levels is produced by chronotype variation, and that chronotype covaries with age. Thus, asynchronous periods of wakefulness provide an opportunity for vigilance when sleeping in groups. We propose that throughout human evolution, sleeping groups composed of mixed age classes provided a form of vigilance. Chronotype variation and human sleep architecture (including nocturnal awakenings) in modern populations may therefore represent a legacy of natural selection acting in the past to reduce the dangers of sleep. © 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.

Disciplines

Anthropology

Language

English

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