A new study claims to have learned one of the reasons that humans were able to rapidly evolve beyond rival primates, and it’s all down to our weird sleeping patterns. Researchers at Duke University, as reported by the New York Times, believe that our seven-hours-of-straight-shut-eye sleep cycle is something of an aberration. By comparison, chimpanzees enjoy 11.5 hours of rest, but our shorter run enabled us to get a much deeper, more dream-filled snooze. Humans, it seems, have above-average quantities of REM sleep, enabling us to slice valuable hours off the amount of time we’re laid up.
The study claims that one of the causes for this process was humans descent from the trees to laying on the floor. The contention being that you can relax a lot more if you’re not subconsciously worrying about rolling in the middle of the night and landing several feet further down.
via Engadget
