According to the BBC, the idea of sleeping right through the night is a fairly modern one. Apparently in antiquity people would sleep for a few hours in the early evening then get up for a few hours then go back to bed.
His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past,
published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a
segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books
and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of
modern tribes in Nigeria.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references
describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed
by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
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