Beds feel distinctly modern. Probably because every bed nowadays unfurls from a compact cube like a rehydrated food from a sci-fi movie. Or comes packed with futuristic tech that makes the sack your great, great, great grandparents slept on look like a sack stuffed with hay. But beds go back hundreds of thousands of years. And a team of researchers just published evidence of some of the remains from a famous cave that countless human ancestors called home over the centuries.
According to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, detailed by IFLScience, prehistoric humans living in South Africa’s Border Cave were making, burning, and rebuilding their beds in a cycle that demonstrates a surprisingly disciplined housekeeping routine.
To put it another way, extremely primitive people from 200,000 years ago were better at making their beds than you are.
The cave was regularly occupied between roughly 220,000 and 43,000 years ago. As such, it’s loaded with evidence of human habitation, including six well-preserved ancient bed-like structures dating back as far as 161,000 years, with earlier bedding evidence dating back nearly 200,000 years.
A 200,000-Year-Old Discovery Suggests Early Humans Were More Advanced Than We Realized
The beds were mostly constructed from grasses in the Panicoideae family, which are relatives of today’s maize and sugarcane. There were also some sedges and layers of ash in there. Most interestingly, the researchers found evidence that these ancient people repeatedly and intentionally burned bedding and rebuilt it over older layers, a process they think was about maintaining their sleeping areas.
And yet, you or someone you know has not made their bed since they were 12.
Scientists think the ash may have helped repel insects or kept the sleeping surface clean. Either way, the behavior remained stable for tens of thousands of years. We have expensive mattresses now, and we keep them in expensive homes and apartments, so we’re not going to be burning them down to replace them with a new one anymore, but ancient people from hundreds of thousands of years ago did not have access to Purple mattresses or Casper mattresses or any of the number of mattress companies you hear advertised on podcasts.
These early humans were dedicated to not sleeping in filth, unlike some modern humans.
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