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Why humans get less sleep than other primates – By Elizabeth Preston Source:bbc.com The amount of time we spend awake and asleep compared to our relatives among the apes, monkeys and lemurs may have played a key role in our evolution. On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical city-dweller in North America or Europe who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies – the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in – average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s surprising when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, ...