
People slept on grass beds 200k years ago - diodorus
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/people-slept-on-comfy-grass-beds-200000-years-ago/
======
hirundo
The best mattress I ever had was soft fine sand in the curve of a dry gulch,
after weeks of sleeping on hard ground on a long hike. It was also one of the
stupidest places I've slept since a flash flood could have ended me.

But if I had to sleep rough in one place for long I might build a sand box
bed. If the ancients did that I doubt archaeologists would discover it, since
it's just a pile of sand.

~~~
econcon
I use granite slab as my bed.

In winters I heat it from below using silicone temperature controlled mats.

Am I the only one who prefers flat and hard bed?

Granite is my bed and mattress.

~~~
seibelj
I have a ridiculously bad back (as does my father) and have developed a large
variety of tricks to minimize pain. One is I sleep on a maximally firm futon.
When I go on trips, if the bed I’m sleeping in is too soft, I lay a blanket on
hard wood and sleep on it. I sleep very well this way. A slab of granite would
be fine as a bed.

If I was ever put in a dungeon, at least I would sleep soundly on the concrete
floor!

~~~
mehrdadn
> A slab of granite would be fine as a bed.

To clarify -- I assume you mean only with the blanket, right? Or are you fine
sleeping on it directly too?

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bdr
If you're interested in how ancient humans lived, I recommend "The Old Way: A
Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived among the
hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. It has a nice mix of information, narrative,
and hypothesis. Grass beds are one of the first things she talks about.

------
User23
It sounds rather a lot less pleasant when you describe it as a straw pallet.

That said, early humans that managed to survive childhood most likely had
generally pleasant lives. That and their average level of physical fitness
based on archeological evidence would rate at the elite level today. I recall
reading about a fossilized set of footprints in Australia that indicated a
foot speed that would shame Usain Bolt, and presumably fossilization doesn’t
have a foot speed bias.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _early humans that managed to survive childhood_

As a new parent (14 m.o.), I keep wondering, how did early humans - in the
pre-language, pre-writing times - managed to survive, given how much care and
supervision small babies require?

~~~
austhrow743
Are you trying to achieve things more complex than pick nuts and berries up
off the ground and eat them?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Not die through picking up the wrong nuts and berries and eating them. Small
kids try to eat literally anything they can get their hands on.

------
war1025
We sleep on a bed made of wool batting enclosed in two sewed together wool
blankets. It is super comfortable. I think most people would be better served
by abandoning modern "inner-spring" mattresses

~~~
TylerE
Seems most people are buying foam mattresses these days, not spring?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
My old internally sprung mattress did me great for years but finally sprang a
spring and that was that.

Got a modern foam mattress as they were all the thing, a very well reviewed
one, and regretted it ever since. It rapidly developed a sag under my quite
moderate weight, and it keeps in heat rather well so in summer you cook. My
advice is, don't. My next mattress will be the old fashioned sprung ones
again. IME, YMMV.

~~~
bontaq
I'm waiting for sleeping in hammocks to catch on here. Soon, there'll be an
article espousing easy summer sleeping and the more vertical position making
for easier breathing. I do sleep in one but it'll be funny to see.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
For many couples, a bed is used not only for sleeping but also for recreation.
I could see the novelty of a hammock wearing off quickly.

~~~
war1025
"recreation" can be had in many places.

In case anyone reads this:

One of the best things my wife and I have done in the past year was to switch
to each of us having our own set of sheets. It's amazing. Highly recommended.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Sounds like a very interesting piece of advice, but I'm not entirely sure what
you're saying.

Do you have two twin mattresses side-by-side, each with its own set of sheets?

~~~
war1025
We share a bed, we just each have a set of blankets.

This is probably only feasible because we sleep on the floor, which means the
blankets don't tend to wander in the night.

Lots of covers stealing other blanket shenanigans have been avoided in the
past year though from that change.

------
amelius
Interesting old HN discussion on mattresses in case anyone is planning to buy
some:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376248)

~~~
ffritz
The ref I was looking for. Thanks!

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trhway
once many years ago went hiking into forest (Russian North West) with minimal
gear (knife, lighter, fishing thread and hooks, several SPAMs and some bread).
For 3 nights i slept on a very comfortable pile of fir tree branches
("lapnik") by the campfire under a fir tree - so even small rain actually
didn't reach me. It was late Spring, pretty warm. For winter time it is pretty
established practice to sleep right on top of the extinguished campfire.

Speaking of mattresses - my wife has already close to 20 years been sleeping
on a Japanese rice straw tatami mats (put onto a nice real wood frame), and
she loves it. A bit too tough for me though.

~~~
trianglem
How do you deal with ticks?

~~~
trhway
i heard about them, never met :) They do exist in Russia, yet frequency of
encounters seems to be low. An important factor is probably that weather there
is colder (and usually wetter) than say here plus mosquitoes so going into the
forest you usually have all your body covered.

------
tazedsoul
On a related note, I recently tried floor sleeping. I started on a carpet,
which was nice. Then we moved to a place with hardwood floors. Painful. So I
bought a Japanese futon. I don’t feel much desire to return to the modern
mattress. Since I began this experiment, I’ve only slept better and felt
better than I did sleeping on various such mattresses over the years.

~~~
seventhtiger
I've noticed my allergies are more severe when sleeping on the floor. I
believe more dust settles on the futon and bedding if it's directly on the
floor.

Platform beds are great, and there are quite minimal ones. It improved my
allergies.

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LolWolf
The DOI link in the article is broken, but if anybody is interested, the
original paper appeared in _Science_ :
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/863](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/863)
(paywalled)

There are several websites that can help get around this paywall :)

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protomyth
If I remember correctly horse hide keeps the fleas away. Remember that from a
book I read on the Mongols.

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Nacdor
I'm trying to understand the moderation policies here. Why was the word
'comfy' removed from the HN title even though it's part of the article's
title? When I checked HN a few hours ago the word 'comfy' was definitely
there.

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nix23
Take out the organs and bones of a pig, rub it with salt stuff it with
straw..best mattress ever.

[http://store.michaelyamashita.com/media/5c5bc58c-418e-11e3-b...](http://store.michaelyamashita.com/media/5c5bc58c-418e-11e3-be82-afc8ec78b92a-mosuo-
tribesmen-carry-a-salted-pig-used-as-a-mattress-and-for)

------
tpmx
Reading these comments seems pretty similar to listening to a podcast ad. Just
saying.

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bookofjoe
If money is no object:
[https://www.hypnosbeds.com/us](https://www.hypnosbeds.com/us)

------
mnemonicsloth
It's a bad idea to romanticize the lives of paleolithic peoples. They may have
had cozy beds, but it's likely these people were:

\- thirsty (no tech for carrying water)

\- hot (no air conditioning)

\- hungry (hunter gatherers don't eat every day)

\- practicing "open defecation"

\- covered with insect bites

\- riddled with intestinal parasites

\- frequently sick (no vaccines/antibiotics)

\- one compound fracture away from death by sepsis

and liable to be murdered by humans from other tribes or, according to some
studies, possibly from your own if you ever stop pulling your weight.

~~~
sjtindell
Anthropologists before and in our lifetimes have gone and lived with tribes of
hunter gatherers. We don’t need to romanticize or use cliches. Lots of them
weren’t living as you describe. In fact their eyesight, teeth/gums, mental
health, general physical health, sex lives, and life satisfaction seemed
pretty great sometimes, and there’s interesting points to be made about why
modernity might not have all the answers.

Let’s take your poop example. The average American, depressed and overweight
according to the stats (both conditions rarely recorded in interactions with
tribal hunter gatherers), poops in a toilet, they don’t “practice open
defecation” (what funny phrasing). And that’s bad for you. We know now that if
you don’t squat, it makes you strain (people literally die on toilets
straining to poop) and you can’t get it all out. So we’ve invented poop
stools. You should get one, it’s fantastic by the way, you’ll never poop the
same again. This is just one of the many ways supposedly superior modern
living has essentially played us, and our inventions solve problems that
progress creates in the first place!

You’re right in some ways. I’m not a believer in “noble savages“. Modern
sanitation is responsible probably more than anything for humanities success
so far. But it’s a subtle topic.

~~~
andrei_says_
Thumbs up for poop stools :)

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johndoe42377
> 200k years ago

Oh, really? And what evidence do we have about anything this distant?

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qubex
Of course they slept on grass to begin with (outdoors)... and of course, once
they settled, they would reproduce the same arrangement in a proto-domestic
setting.

Also: people at some point discovered they could lay down floors, because it
felt good underfoot. Then they realised that floors would be great to have in
more places. Then somebody came up with the idea of making mobile pieces of
floor and strapping them to the underside of your feet. And so, sandals and
footwear were born.

Archeological records are good, but deduction will get you a surprisingly long
way.

~~~
cntainer
The issue with this kind of reasoning is that without any kind of
archeological proof to back your hypothesis what you end up with is informed
guessing based more on ones knowledge and experience than on scientific facts.

For example, I could formulate a completely different hypothesis about how
footwear appeared:

    
    
      - doing any kind of activity on rough terrain while barefoot increases the risk of injury, like cuts or punctures
    
      - any kind of wound could easily infect and lead to death
    
      - the easiest would be to try and protect my feet wrapping something like leaves, animal skins, etc around my feet
    
      - this is a good solution but this footwear isn't very resilient, hmm, maybe tree bark would work better, it's still flexible but should be more resilient.
    
      - hmm, what else could I do that is better than tree bark, maybe some dried animal skin would be even better
    
      - and so on...
    

Is this hypothesis better than yours? I don't know without proof, and the
interesting part is that they could both easily be true in completely
different contexts: different parts of the world, different cultures,
different climatic conditions, etc.

So yeah deduction and induction can get you very far but when we're missing so
many facts on which to base our hypothesis you can easily get very far in a
very wrong direction. This is why I think archeology is fun.

EDIT: The wikipedia page on footwear also contains a few lines that add
another interesting dimension:

> Some ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Greece however saw no
> practical need for footwear due to convenient climatic and landscape
> situations and used shoes primarily as ornaments and insignia of power.

~~~
qubex
Fair enough, good points, but you’ll find that habitually unshod people have
surprisingly thick (and yet still perfectly sensitive!) soles that are very
resilient to puncture and yet do not experience pain when walking over terrain
that makes us grimace. That doesn’t pertain to all of your hypotheses, and
even those it does apply to are not ruled out by it, so I concede you could be
correct, as could I. The real question is: which these(s) can be proven.
That’s what’s interesting about this article: that they have found
archeological evidence that supports an... I’m struggling not to use ‘obvious’
because I’ve been chided for using it... but a... very plausible hypothesis.

~~~
cntainer
The article makes it pretty clear that they have the evidence to support their
hypothesis about the history of bedding, so there's no question about that
part :).

My point was more focused on your example about footwear and on the fact that
just using deduction or other reasoning techniques without starting from real
archeological proof can easily lead one astray.

So I'm not trying to compete on which hypothesis about footwear is better I
just gave that example in support of the point I just mentioned above.

