古人晚上都在干啥

发布于 2026-05-22 · 时长 8:35

字幕摘录

时间	英文	中文
0:00	Tonight, when the sun goes down, you're going to flip a switch.	今晚,当太阳下山时,你会翻开开关.
0:02	Light will flood the room, and you won't think twice about it.	光会淹没房间,你也不会再想了.
0:05	But for 99.9% of human history, that switch didn't exist.	但对于99.9%的人类历史来说,这个开关并不存在.
0:09	When the sun set, the world went dark.	日落时,天下阴暗.
0:12	You couldn't even see your own hand in front of your face.	你连自己的手都看不到
0:14	But modern humans almost never experienced this.	但现代人类几乎从未经历过这种情况.
0:17	For over 300,000 years, every single one of your ancestors spent roughly half their life	30万年来,你每个祖先都花费了大约一半的生命
0:23	in near-total darkness.	在几乎完全的黑暗中。
0:25	They didn't even have candles for most of that time.	大部分时间都没有蜡烛
0:27	Just the black sky, the stars, and whatever fire they could keep alive.	只有黑天星星以及他们能活着的火

展开字幕全文（173 条）

序号	英文	中文
1	Tonight, when the sun goes down, you're going to flip a switch.	今晚,当太阳下山时,你会翻开开关.
2	Light will flood the room, and you won't think twice about it.	光会淹没房间,你也不会再想了.
3	But for 99.9% of human history, that switch didn't exist.	但对于99.9%的人类历史来说,这个开关并不存在.
4	When the sun set, the world went dark.	日落时,天下阴暗.
5	You couldn't even see your own hand in front of your face.	你连自己的手都看不到
6	But modern humans almost never experienced this.	但现代人类几乎从未经历过这种情况.
7	For over 300,000 years, every single one of your ancestors spent roughly half their life	30万年来,你每个祖先都花费了大约一半的生命
8	in near-total darkness.	在几乎完全的黑暗中。
9	They didn't even have candles for most of that time.	大部分时间都没有蜡烛
10	Just the black sky, the stars, and whatever fire they could keep alive.	只有黑天星星以及他们能活着的火
11	So what did they actually do for all those hours?	那么这些小时他们都做了些什么?
12	The answer changes everything we think we know about sleep, storytelling, and what it	答案改变了我们所知道的一切关于睡眠,讲故事和它是什么
13	means to be human.	意思是成为人类
14	Let's start with fire.	从火起.
15	Because fire is the reason any of this was possible, the earliest solid evidence of humans	因为火是这一切可能的原因人类最早的确凿证据
16	controlling fire comes from Wonderwerke Cave in South Africa, roughly one million years	控制火灾来自南非的Wonderwerke洞穴,大约100万年
17	ago.	刚才
18	But fire didn't just keep people warm.	但火并不只是让人们温暖
19	Fire completely restructured the human day.	火彻底重组了人类日.
20	Before fire, our ancestors were like every other primate.	在火灾发生之前我们的祖先就像其他灵长类动物一样
21	When the sun went down, you climbed a tree or found a sheltered spot and you stayed still.	太阳下山的时候,你爬上一棵树或者找到一个隐蔽的地方,你呆着。
22	Moving at night meant becoming food.	晚上搬家意味着成为食物。
23	Our eyes are terrible in the dark compared to the predators that hunted us.	和猎杀我们的掠食者相比,我们的眼睛在黑暗中是可怕的.
24	Leopards, hyenas, wolves, all of them could see just fine.	豹, ,狼,他们都能看到
25	Fire changed that equation overnight.	火一夜之间改变了方程式
26	Literally.	当然
27	A campfire creates a circle of safety roughly 30 feet in diameter.	一场营火创造了一个直径约30英尺的安全圈.
28	Inside that circle, predators won't come.	在那个圈子里,掠食者不会来
29	Outside that circle, you die.	在那个圈子外,你会死。
30	This is not an exaggeration.	这不是夸张。
31	Anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer groups have documented that people who wander	人类学家研究现代猎人-采集者群体记录了游民
32	away from the fire at night are significantly more likely to be killed by predators.	远离夜间的火灾更可能被掠食者杀死
33	Even today.	乃至今时.
34	But here's what's fascinating.	但这里的吸引力。
35	Fire didn't just protect humans at night.	火不仅仅在夜间保护人类.
36	It gave them something they'd never had before.	这给了他们一些以前从未有过的东西.
37	Extra hours.	额外时间。
38	Think about this.	考虑一下
39	Before fire, the useful day ended at sunset.	火灾发生前,有用的一天在日落时结束.
40	That's maybe 12 hours in summer, as few as 8 in winter.	夏天大概有12个小时,冬天只有8个小时。
41	Fire suddenly added 2 to 4 usable hours to every single day.	每一天火力突然增加2到4个可用小时.
42	And over thousands of generations, those extra hours changed our species.	超过数千代,这些额外的时间改变了我们的物种。
43	In 2014, anthropologist Polly Wiesner published a study in the Proceedings of the National	2014年,人类学家Polly Wiesner在"全国纪录"上发表了一份研究报告.
44	Academy of Sciences.	科学院.
45	She spent years recording conversations among the Jew-slash-Huansi Bushmen of the Kalahari	她花了数年时间记录喀拉哈里的犹太人 - 什叶派 - 胡安西布什人之间的谈话
46	Desert, one of the last groups on Earth still living something close to the original human	沙漠,地球上最后一群人之一仍然生活在靠近原始人类的地方
47	lifestyle.	生活方式。
48	She found what was striking.	她发现了惊人的东西。
49	During the day, about 80% of conversations were practical.	白天,约80%的对话是实用的.
50	Who's hunting where?	谁在打猎?
51	Which plants are ready?	什么植物准备好了?
52	Complaints.	投诉
53	Logistics.	后勤.
54	Economic negotiations.	经济谈判。
55	Daytime talk was work.	白天谈话就是工作
56	But at night, around the fire, the entire character of conversation changed.	但到了晚上,在火场周围,对话的整个角色都发生了变化.
57	At night, 81% of conversations were stories.	晚上,81%的对话都是故事.
58	Tales of people in distant places.	远处人的故事.
59	Myths about the origins of the world.	关于世界起源的神话.
60	Jokes that made the whole camp laugh.	笑话让整个营地都笑了
61	Wiesner argued that fire-like conversation is where human culture was born.	威斯纳认为,类似火的谈话是人类文化诞生的地方.
62	The campfire was the original theater, the original classroom, the original church.	营火原为原剧场,原教室,原教堂.
63	It's where humans learned to think beyond the immediate present and imagine things that	人类从这里学会思考超越眼前的事物
64	don't exist yet.	还没有存在。
65	It's where we became us.	这是我们成为我们的地方。
66	But the night wasn't just about stories around the fire.	但夜晚不只是关于围绕火灾的故事。
67	There was something else happening, something that scientists only rediscovered in the last	发生了一些其他的事科学家在最后才发现的
68	30 years.	30岁
69	You were not designed to sleep the way you sleep right now.	你被设计成不能像你现在这样睡觉
70	In 2001, historian Roger E. Kirch published a paper that changed sleep science.	2001年,历史学家罗杰·E·基什发表了一篇改变睡眠科学的论文.
71	He had spent 16 years digging through historical records, and he found something nobody expected.	他花了16年时间挖掘历史记录,他发现了一些没人期待的东西.
72	Over 500 references, spanning centuries, prayer books from the 1400s, court records,	五百多份参考书历经几个世纪一千四百年代的祷告书法庭记录
73	diaries, medical texts, letters from ordinary people, even passages in Homer's Odyssey.	日记医疗文本普通人的信甚至霍默的奥德赛的段落
74	All of them mentioned the same thing, first sleep and second sleep.	他们都提到了同样的事情,第一次睡眠和第二次睡眠.
75	Before the industrial age, people did not sleep in one continuous block.	在工业时代之前,人们没有在一个连续的街区中睡觉.
76	They went to bed shortly after sunset, slept for about four hours, then woke up.	他们日落后不久就上床睡觉,睡了大约四个小时,然后醒来.
77	They stayed awake for one to two hours in the middle of the night.	他们半夜醒了一到两小时
78	Then they went back to sleep for another four hours until dawn.	然后他们又睡了四个小时直到天亮
79	This wasn't insomnia.	这不是失眠。
80	This was normal.	这是正常的。
81	This was how every human on the planet slept for thousands of years.	地球上的每一个人都睡了几千年
82	And what did people do during that wakeful period in the middle of the night?	在半夜的觉醒期里人们做了什么?
83	Everything.	一切众生.
84	A 16th century French physician recommended that couples conceive children during this	一位16世纪的法国医生建议夫妇在这期间生孩子
85	window because they would do it better.	因为它会做得更好。
86	People visited neighbors, they interpreted their dreams while they were still fresh.	人们拜访邻居,在新鲜的时候诠释自己的梦想.
87	They wrote.	他们写了
88	They simply lay in bed in the dark and thought.	他们只是躺在床上在黑暗和思考。
89	A doctor's manual from the 1500s advised patients that the best time to study and reflect	1500年代的医生手册告诉病人最好的研究和思考时间
90	was during the watch, as they called it.	在表里,就像他们所说的。
91	The quiet hours between first and second sleep, when the mind was calm and the world was still.	第一次睡眠和第二次睡眠之间的静静时间,当时心灵平静,世界静静.
92	Now historians had been reading these references for centuries.	现在历史学家已经读了这些参考文献几个世纪了.
93	But they kept translating first sleep as something else.	但他们不停地翻译第一次睡眠作为别的东西。
94	Because they couldn't imagine that people ever slept differently than we do now.	因为他们无法想象人们睡得跟我们现在不一样
95	The assumption was so deep that translators literally mistranslated ancient Greek and	这个假设非常深刻,以至于翻译者在字面上误译了古希腊语和古希腊语。
96	medieval Latin to make it fit their modern experience.	中世纪拉丁语使其符合他们的现代经验.
97	But then science confirmed what history had been saying all along.	但后来科学证实了历史一直以来的说法.
98	In 1992, psychiatrist Thomas Ware at the National Institute of Mental Health ran an experiment.	1992年,国家心理健康研究所的精神病医生托马斯·沃雷(Thomas Ware)进行了实验.
99	He took a group of volunteers and removed all artificial light from their lives.	他带走了一批志愿者,并清除了他们生活中所有的人工光芒.
100	For one month, they experienced 14 hours of darkness every night, just like our ancestors	一个月来他们每晚都经历14小时的黑暗就像我们的祖先一样
101	would have before fire extended the evening.	在火延时之前,
102	Within weeks, every single participant settled into the same pattern.	几周内,每个参与者都步入同一模式。
103	Four hours of sleep, one to three hours of quiet wakefulness, then four more hours of sleep.	4小时的睡眠,1到3小时的静静觉醒,然后再4小时的睡眠.
104	Nobody told them to do this, nobody suggested it, their bodies just did it, as if some ancient	没人叫他们这么做没人建议他们这么做他们的身体就是这么做的好像有些古老的
105	program had been waiting inside them the whole time, buried under centuries of artificial light.	程序一直等待在他们体内埋在几个世纪的人工光下
106	Ware measured their hormone levels during the wakeful period and found something remarkable.	怀尔在醒悟期测量了它们的激素水平,发现了一些令人瞩目的东西.
107	The participants were in a state unlike any normal waking state.	与会者所处的状态与正常的觉醒状态不同。
108	Their brains were producing elevated levels of prolactin, the same hormone released during	他们的大脑正在产生高水平的亲乳素, 同样的激素释放
109	meditation and after orgasm.	冥想和高潮过后.
110	They described feeling peaceful, reflective, almost meditative.	他们描述了和平、反省、几乎沉思的感觉。
111	It wasn't just a gap in sleep, it was its own distinct state of consciousness, one that	这不仅仅是睡眠的空隙, 它是它自己独特的意识状态,
112	most modern humans have never experienced.	大多数现代人类从未经历过
113	So what killed it?	那是谁杀了它?
114	The answer is simpler than you'd think.	答案比你想象的简单
115	Light.	轻.
116	In the 1600s, cities began installing street lamps.	1600年代,城市开始安装街灯.
117	Paris was one of the first, under Louis XIV, who wanted to reduce crime.	巴黎是路易十四领导下最早想要减少犯罪的国家之一.
118	London followed.	伦敦紧随其后.
119	The night, which had been a place of danger and fear, slowly became navigable.	曾经是危险和恐惧之地的夜晚慢慢变得可以航行.
120	Then came cheaper candles.	然后是更便宜的蜡烛
121	Then gas lamps in the 1800s.	1800年代的煤气灯
122	Then, in 1879, Thomas Edison commercialized the electric light bulb.	随后在1879年,托马斯·爱迪生将电灯泡商业化.
123	And within a generation, the night as humans had known it for 300,000 years was gone.	在一代人的时间里, 人类30万年来所知道的夜晚就消失了。
124	And here's the part nobody talks about.	这是没有人谈论的部分。
125	The word curfew comes from the French couvre-feu.	宵禁一词来源于法国的couvre-feu.
126	It literally means cover fire.	它的字面意思是盖火。
127	In medieval towns, a bell would ring at night signaling everyone to cover or extinguish	在中世纪的城镇, 夜晚会响起警铃, 向所有人发出掩护或扑灭信号
128	their fires.	他们的火。
129	Not because of safety, because night was supposed to be dark.	不是因为安全, 因为夜晚应该是黑暗的。
130	Night was when you slept.	晚上是你睡觉的时候
131	Night was when you were vulnerable.	晚上是你脆弱的时候
132	For most of history, being out at night was suspicious.	在大部分历史中,晚上出门是可疑的.
133	In many medieval European cities, walking outside after dark without a lantern was literally	在许多中世纪的欧洲城市, 黑暗后走出去,没有灯笼
134	illegal.	违法的。
135	Night belonged to criminals and the supernatural.	夜晚属于罪犯和超自然者
136	People feared it in a way that's almost impossible for us to understand today.	人们担心它的方式几乎不可能我们今天理解。
137	And then we conquered it.	然后我们征服了它。
138	We flooded it with light.	我们把它淹没了
139	And we thought that was progress.	我们认为这是进步。
140	But here's what we lost.	但这是我们失去的
141	Modern humans are exposed to artificial light an average of 7 to 8 hours after sunset.	现代人类平均在日落后7至8小时被人工光照射.
142	This light, especially the blue light from screens, suppresses your body's production	这种光,特别是屏幕上的蓝光,压制了身体的制作
143	of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep.	控制睡眠的激素
144	Your body doesn't know the difference between a light bulb and the sun.	你的身体不知道灯泡和太阳的区别
145	When light hits your retina at 11pm, your brain interprets it as daytime.	当晚上11点光照到你的视网膜时你的大脑会把它解释为白天
146	It delays melatonin release.	延缓了麦拉东宁的释放.
147	It fragments your sleep.	它让你的睡眠破碎。
148	It disrupts the circadian rhythm that evolved over millions of years.	它扰乱了数百万年来演变的循环节奏.
149	Researchers have found that people who go camping for just one week with no artificial	研究人员发现,人们去露营仅仅一个星期,没有人工
150	light at all have their melatonin cycles reset by nearly two hours.	光线可以让它们的麦拉酮循环重置近两小时
151	Their bodies start producing melatonin at sunset instead of hours after it.	他们的身体在日落时开始生产梅拉托宁,而不是在之后数小时.
152	That's all it takes for 300,000 years of programming to reassert itself.	30万年的节目编程只能这样才能重现自我
153	We didn't just change when we sleep.	我们不只是在睡觉时变了
154	We eliminated an entire phase of human consciousness.	我们消灭了人类意识的整个阶段。
155	That quiet, reflective state between first and second sleep, the state that wears subjects	第一次睡眠和第二次睡眠之间的静静反射状态, 穿戴主体的状态
156	described as peaceful and meditative, doesn't exist anymore for most people.	被描述为和平和冥想, 对于大多数人来说已经不存在。
157	Instead, we have insomnia.	相反,我们有失眠。
158	And we treat it like a disorder.	我们把它当成一个障碍。
159	But what if it's not a disorder at all?	但如果这根本不是障碍呢?
160	What if waking up at 2am and lying there in the dark isn't your body malfunctioning?	如果凌晨2点醒来躺在黑暗中你的身体是不是故障?
161	What if it's your body remembering what it was built to do?	如果这是你的身体记得它是用来做什么的?
162	For 300,000 years, your ancestors spent their nights in a rhythm that modern science is	30万年来,你的祖先们以现代科学的节奏度过他们的夜晚
163	only beginning to understand.	才刚开始明白
164	They gathered around fires and told stories that built civilizations.	他们聚集在大火周围,讲述建立文明的故事.
165	They slept in two phases with a window of quiet reflection in between.	他们分两个阶段睡觉,中间有一个静静的反射窗口。
166	They lived in darkness so complete that the Milky Way wasn't something you had to drive	他们生活在黑暗中如此完整银河不是你必须驾驶的东西
167	to a national park to see.	去国家公园看看
168	It was just the sky.	这只是天空。
169	And every night, when they woke in the dark between first and second sleep, they lay there	每天晚上,当他们在第一次和第二次睡眠的黑暗中醒来时,他们就躺在那
170	in silence and thought about their lives, their dreams, and the world they would wake	默默地思考着他们的生活他们的梦想还有他们醒悟的世界
171	up to in the morning.	到早上为止
172	We traded all of that for a light switch.	我们把这些都换成了灯光开关
173	And most of us never even knew it was gone.	我们大多数人甚至不知道它不见了。

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