[FredrikMeyer]

I find this article quite insubstantial. He lists alternative sleeping positions, but no sources backing up the claim that "western sleeping positions" (whatever that is) are worse.

Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates.

Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).

[spaceman_2020]

The poor people in my country squat when they're resting. I was taught early on as a kid that I shouldn't sit like that because that's what "poor people do".

I really regret listening to that piece of advice. As I observe my baby daughter, I realize how natural that squatting position is, and how much knee and hip mobility we really have.

[lukan]

Same with walking barefeet. Now it is somewhat hip again in some areas, but not where I live. "Mum, why does this man wear no shoes?" I hear so often.

Now walking barefeet in the city is not recommended because of glass and dogshit everywhere, but through a path in the forest and over rocks it is much more fun (and healthy for my joints) without shoes. That is, if you relearned how to do it. You cannot walk barefeet, like you do with shoes. Also, if you started walking barefeet over 20, your skeleton and muscles in the feet will never really adopt again, like they would if you do it as a child. So if you have childs, let them go barefeet wherever and whenever possible (also in the snow for a short time).

[fredrikholm]

Often the limiting factor is ankle mobility, as not being able to drive the knee in front of the toes means falling backwards as the center of mass never reaches mid foot.

It's why weightlifters have elevated heels, and why great squatters tend to have short femurs (and/or be short in general).

[polishdude20]

A lot of it also depends on getting the knees spread out and letting your stomach come forward in between. This keeps your center of gravity forward.

[looping8]

It also feels a little strange in writing. Examples:

"Figure Figure11 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow" - Of course it is without a pillow, it's a mountain gorilla! What is this clarification?

"To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a doorframe." - Would it not be better to say "you may have to hold on" or "newbies"? It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.

[adrian_b]

I have read your comment before reading the article, and at that time I have thought that you must be right.

Nevertheless, after reading the article I have seen that the clarification about the gorilla sleeping without a pillow made perfect sense in its context, because it has not been added to provide any additional information, but it was added for emphasis, in a context where the sleeping positions in modern environments were contrasted with their correspondents that are common both in non-modernized environments and for similar primates.

Moreover, I interpret his phrase "To start with" as having the same meaning as your suggestion "newbies".

Using a door frame in the beginning is indeed good practical advice for achieving the full squat position for those who are not used to it.

[watwut]

It did not made sense to me, because I am not a gorilla. They have different bodies. They look kinda similar in body shape, but they climb treat the way I will never be able to no matter how much I train.

So, gorila sleeping position implies exactly nothing for my sleeping position.

[kijin]

A pillow doesn't need to be a factory-made product that you buy at a store. Plenty of humans make pillows out of natural objects when sleeping outdoors. I can totally imagine a mountain gorilla using a chunk of wood, or even a body part of another gorilla, as a "pillow" if it makes them feel more comfortable.

[navane]

My dog loves pillows. But he doesn't move them. If he's laying down, and a pillow-like object is near, he'll use it. But if the sun moves, he'll move, without the pillow.

[bee_rider]

Humans are environment-changers. That’s why dogs teamed up with humans. Humans seem to spend a lot of time doing strange and seemingly useless things, like banging rocks together and looking at shiny boxes, but at the end of the day there is always extra food and the environment around humans is full of mysteriously comfortable objects.

[slow_typist]

If our dog wants to rest and a fleece or wool blanket happens to be in reach, it will pull it in position (and sometimes even fold it) in order to rest its snout on it. But admittedly it does not move the blanket substantially. I have yet to understand how it decides where to rest though. There is a lot of places and none seems to really dominate the other ones.

[navane]

I have been paying more attention and ours loves head rests. So maybe they don't understand how to make or move them, he definitely prefers them. Disputing the original claim, or dogs differ too much from primates.

[yencabulator]

For what it's worth, my dog does carry big fluffy toys around, often putting her chin on them.

[ErigmolCt]

In order to protect skin on your face from acne or wrinkles I think it preferable to sleep on a pillow

[malfist]

I don't think gorillas are too worried about acne or wrinkles.

[helboi4]

Yeah im sure there are many tribespeople with pillows. It feels wierdly racist that this guy is acting like people in societies like this just live instinctually like gorillas and don't actually have the universal human trait of creating and relying on manmade tools.

[throwway120385]

The thing that makes it not racist for me is that he's clearly trying to point out that, as primates, in non-Western surroundings and when not socialized to prefer soft beds with fluffy pillows we tend to adopt similar sleeping positions as other primates do. It would be very racist if he had adopted a sneering "look at the lowly primitives" tone, but he's trying to show that these sleeping positions have helped him immensely and he's suggesting that we might research sleep positioning more as there seem to be differences in the two populations under comparison.

You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."

[chillingeffect]

He's viewing humans and gorillas as primates, not viewing tribespeople as gorillas.

Tribes people don't live instinctually. They have culture, like us. The critique here is our culture could benefit from observing how their culture does it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Of course it is without a pillow, it's a mountain gorilla!

That doesn't follow at all. Gorillas are well known for their habit of making nests. Making pillows isn't difficult.

[elric]

Indeed. Many animals build nests. It's not a skill unique to humans at all. Finding something comfortable to rest on isn't a particularly difficult skill to master.

[olalonde]

I'm a human and I don't think I'd be able to make a (comfortable) pillow...

[thaumasiotes]

Go pull a bunch of grass, and put it in a pile. You now have a working pillow.

[olalonde]

That doesn't sound comfortable. I'd probably rather sleep on my arm than a pile of grass...

[avery17]

Im sure if you spent your whole life sleeping on the ground youd work something out to make it more comfortable

[thaumasiotes]

This is a failure of your imagination, not the grass.

[watwut]

It can be actually comfortable.

[082349872349872]

You (most likely) have two comfortable potential pillows distal to your elbows...

(I don't use any of these positions, but I most commonly nap on a heated wooden floor in an insect-free environment. Oddly enough, I also support my temple on the dorsal surface of a wrist; it had never occurred to me that in addition to comfort, it keeps both ears free?)

[jacobolus]

> It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.

Lack of practice causes a "special physiological feature": ankle inflexibility. For some people it would take a significant amount of time stretching the ankles every day to recover enough ankle flexibility to squat, and that could perhaps still be insufficient, as joint mobility is established based on the range of motion used in childhood.

[techcode]

All the babies/toddlers I've seen (my own kids included) naturally do that "asian/slav squat" - for example to pick up toys from the ground, or when they want to rest a bit without completely sitting, right?

So at which point/age do some of us stop doing that type of squat before "use it or lose it" kicks in?

[helboi4]

Funnily, as a brit, I have always had the ability to sit in a deep squat comfortably and it's not even from tons of practice. I only even realised that its unusual to be able to do and that it may be good for you when I was about 21. By which point there were many people who couldn't do it already. I certainly hadn't been practicing it throughout my teenage years.

[frereubu]

I'm a Brit who can squat too, and I think it has quite a bit to do with not weather shoes at home and wearing "barefoot" shoes / zero-drop trainers outside. I have a hunch that it's lengthened my calf muscles and achilles tendons, which makes squatting much more comfortable. I couldn't really do it before switching to barefoot shoes.

[throwaway828]

Having lived in Asia for 10 years I observed that I had gained the ability to squat, quite comfortably too, that I never had on arrival.

Funny old world.

[helboi4]

I have never worn shoes at home, that's for sure. Not into barefoot shoes though. I'm not really sure why it is for me. If it's to do with calf muscles, I guess we could attribute it that my mother never learned how to drive and so we used to walk EVERYWHERE. And we lived in a tiny town.

[NalNezumi]

I don't think it's fair to outright dismiss it because it is not a systematic/empirical study (and the author explicitly mention that). In the case of posture, stretching & training I think there's several exercises out there that doesn't have a rigorous empirical study to back it up, yet can be explained to be good/bad from our anatomical understanding of the human body.

[RamblingCTO]

> I don't think it's fair to outright dismiss it because it is not a systematic/empirical study

That's how science works. Show sources/data/experiments or gtfo

[roenxi]

Science requires a level of common sense and intuition. Famously: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

It is fine, indeed should be encouraged, to put some papers in the system that don't have formal data but do record common-sense observations. If people don't like them, then they can trump opinion with data in the scientific process.

[NalNezumi]

That's how some steps of the science work, specifically the empirical studies. Empirical validation, falsifiability, and repeatability is all in that ball-park. But it's a part of the process and not all of it.

If that's the only thing you want to consider, sure. As a layman it's probably a good principle, and more so in engineering. But you'll have to shave off some significant works of science from history if you do that.

You can read more about those steps at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

[mo_42]

Einstein and Higgs predicted phenomena that were tested years resp. decades after their publication.

A theory is also a contribution to a field as long as it tested (not necessarily in the same publication).

Even an observation to a field can be a contribution if it helps people generate new theories and then test them.

[guappa]

In their defence: building a particle accelerator is a harder and more costly task than watching people sleep.

[chillingeffect]

Experiments are the part people fixate on. Science begins with observation.

[RamblingCTO]

Yes. But just publishing your observations is not enough. And this seems to be a published paper, which I find very weird.

[diydsp]

First, you might want to refresh your understanding of the scientific process. Its first step is "Observation/question." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Next, the acceptability of journal papers without conclusive experiments varies across fields. In some fields, such as observational sciences (e.g., astronomy, ecology, sociology), observational studies are common and valuable contributions to the literature. These studies often involve collecting and analyzing data from real-world observations, surveys, or existing datasets without the need for controlled experiments. In such cases, it is perfectly acceptable to publish papers based solely on observational data.

When you say, "is not enough," the question I respond with is "enough for what?" It's fully acceptable to publish a paper with observations in order to stimulate interest and encourage further research in the area. It's not necessary for a journal to require final results.

Finally, consider some of these famous and important papers which were published as observations without conclusive results. Should they have held back and waited until conclusive results were available?

1. Edwin Hubble's "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae"

2. Albert Einstein's "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity"

3. Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"

[RamblingCTO]

And how old are these publications? And did you have a look at the paper that we're talking about?

[0xEF]

Don't forget the "repeat" part. Sources and data are great, but if they can't be replicated by others, the it's not verifiable.

[lazyasciiart]

Well, unfortunately in this article there are claims that can be explained to be completely false from our anatomical understanding of the human body - such as the idea that it is impossible to snore with your mouth closed.

[ricardobeat]

I thought the 'impossible to snore' note was because of the downwards spine position, where the soft palate cannot collapse. Not because the mouth is closed.

[kqr]

I think this clause near the end was what made the article make sense to me:

> This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction

This is just one person noting in public what could be a correlation, and then all the rest (confirming correlation, establishing causation) is up to someone else!

[sandspar]

I'm not saying it's an either/or choice, but I'd rather trust articles written by obsessed old dude experts rather than articles written by "publish or perish" academics citing 100 other p-hacked "publish or perish" articles.

[talonx]

It's a pity that not more published research is available on this.

[whalabi]

Yeah I had the same response. He makes lots of anecdotal claims about tribespeople's back trouble but where's the data? It's mildly interesting nonetheless.

[IncreasePosts]

There's also so much talk about penis protection, I would love to know if women use different sleeping positions at different rates than men

[roenxi]

This appears to be a journal article. Why should it have citations? This is an arena where people are supposed to be doing primary research. "I have a PhD and this is my opinion" is probably at least 20% of academics.

[sowhat389]

Journals publish articles beyond primary research: https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...

[lazyasciiart]

Primary research does not include simply stating “this is my opinion” - and this article also does not consist of someone stating their opinion, it is someone claiming to describe widespread behaviors and explanations for them.

[lou1306]

I can't possibly imagine sleeping posture being such a a pristine research area that there is no prior work on the topic

[roenxi]

There is a search bar right above this article if you want to look that research up. This is some physiotherapist recording his opinion; based on field experience. I'm going out on a limb and saying none of the other researchers in the field have been writing about his experience so there isn't anything to cite.

[begueradj]

As a North African, I instinctively understand and firmly believe everything mentioned in this article about sleeping is true.

From my perspective, the way I see your comment is this: give me scientific evidence that walking is beneficial to my health.

We lose our identity when we disconnect from Nature. I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants": https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-t...

That's where we are.

[jawns]

> I instinctively understand and firmly believe everything mentioned in this article about sleeping is true.

Well, yes, but that's a standard quality of B.S. It's plausible, and intuitive. When you actually start trying to prove it out, though, you discover it's wrong.

True, there is a category of "no duh" scientific findings, like walking is beneficial to one's health, that do align with our intuition. But where science really shines is when the evidence points to something counterintuitive.

[GuB-42]

Even the "walking is beneficial" part is not just "duh".

I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?

And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.

[navane]

Freakonomics!

[creatonez]

> I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants"

This story is interesting, but doesn't shock me a whole lot from the perspective of losing our touch with nature, because we now have an understanding that our ancestors fluctuated between carnivory and herbivory quite a lot. If these population changes in gut bacteria can be caused in such a short span of time, it seems likely that it can also be reversed.