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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

> Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever.

Does that have stronger historical backing?

There is a lack of historical writings clearly describing segmented sleep as a normal practice over monophasic sleep. If it had been the standard sleep pattern, one would expect abundant evidence for it.

Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.

I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?

You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Monophasic sleep is mentioned, or just sleep is mentioned without hints on whether it was monophasic of polyphasic?

This is tantamount to saying that the Egyptians from the 18th Dynasty onwards did have horses but no black or white ones because while the historical records concerning warfare did mention horses a lot, nowhere is there a mention of black or white horses. I conclude the ancient Egyptians only had brown horses q.e.d.

I wonder how much time zones and seasons impact things. For example, in my city in the winter, it is often dark for 14 straight hours. No average, healthy individual would sleep for that long on a nightly basis. So, even if one slept for 7 hours at sunset, then there would still be 7 hours of darkness remaining upon awakening.

Point being, if one slept for 4-5 hours, wake up for a similar chunk, and slept the same amount again, then that'd be a great way to pass the time one could likely not use to do outdoor labor.

I would posit that the null hypothesis should be that uncoerced human sleep patterns and historical sleep patterns are similar to A: modern human sleep patterns, and B: the sleep patterns of a majority of diurnal mammals and especially those primates most closely related to us: namely "one big stretch of sleep while it is dark a majority of the time when not disturbed by external stimuli or illness".

If historical evidence does not do much to disambiguate this from the alternative hypothesis, then the null hypothesis would be the default presumption.

It is more common in high-latitude countries. Very uncommon in lower latitude.

Another unbacked claim.

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