Nocturnal cultures?

Living north of the Arctic Circle, I guess you can maybe argue that those people's sleep patterns are interrupted by the whole 6 months of night, six months of day thing.
 
Humans aren't really all too evolutionarily good at night. If memory serves, our fear of the dark comes from the fact that our ancestors couldn't see much at night, and were prey to any danger that may have come along.

So it'd require either an evolutionary change, or outside circumstances which make them prone to night rather than day because of what is about during day.
 

Keenir

Banned
Could there be an entire tribe, culture, even civilization that was nocturnal?

there could be...though there would have to be a verrrry good reason for them to not be around in the daytime.

may I suggest Island of the Colorblind? in it, Dr. Sacks finds a signifigant population of people for whom bright sunlight is actually damaging to their eyes - so they tend to be active at sunset, sunrise, and at night.
 
How about people that live in an area in which the heat is unbearable during the day while at night the temperature is comfortable?
 

Keenir

Banned
How about people that live in an area in which the heat is unbearable during the day while at night the temperature is comfortable?

it would have to be hotter than the Danikil of Ethiopia, then. and that's hot.
 
It wouldn't be a human culture who which is nocturnal as has been stated above homo sapiens sapiens is pretty bad at night (poor vision, etc.). However you could have a nocturnal version of humanity evolve homo sapiens nocturnus which is adapted enough to function well at night to be nocturnal but they would be different enough from normal humans to be a true sub-species or separate species.
 
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Well, what's your definition of culture? Certainly groups of people exist who primarily work, eat, and even socialize between early evening and late morning. They're typically referred to as subcultures, but they certainly exist. They also tend to have both odd points of view on the world (qualitatively) and an appreciably shorter lifespan (quantitatively).

It's worth noting, however, that such groups can all be traced to the advent of electric lighting. Perhaps to gas lights, but I couldn't say. It's highly unlikely you'll get a group of humans subjecting themselves to such conditions for mere cultural or even religious reasons. It seems an act that needs a practical basis.

That said.

We live in an era where massive numbers of species - from feral dogs, to deer, to East African sea cows - have all made a transition from flexible or diurnal lifestyles to nocturnal ones. Where mammals can function nocturnally, and where they are constantly surrounded by humans, they quite readily begin sleeping/hiding through the day. This suggests humans could also adapt in such a way in the right circumstances.

What circumstances would those be?

Well, as other posters have mentioned, "the wild" certainly isn't among them. In hunter-gatherer conditions, human night-sight would cripple them both in defending themselves from threats and from finding or hunting sources of food. Clearly then, we need to limit ourselves to settled peoples.

We'll need to start out with a few other assumptions. Food will be harder to get at night, which means there must be more of it available. In areas of scarcity a noturnal culture's disadvantages would render them extinct. Combine that with the cooler temperatures at night and you find your options limited. You can't be doing this in places that are especially cold. So not far to the north or south, and probably not in a major desert, either.

A nocturnal culture would by definition perform most of its activities at night. This is not easy to arrange. The issues aren't merely ones of practicality - but we have to start there. Many kinds of farming require daytime attention, and nearly all animal herding requires day and night supervision. You could collect high-calorie foods, if they required little-or-no caretaking. Mushrooms, perhaps, or nuts if you've few competitors for them (death to squirrels!). Digging anything up would be.... challenging. In terms of protein, invertebrates and birds' eggs are usually available in small quantities given our assumed warm clime. Some fishing is possible, or raising small animals on the stupider side - chickens and guinea fowl and the like. You could probably get sheep and pigs to graze at night - that'd be huge. Certainly, any sustainable source of nutrition would provide much lower returns than doing the same thing during the day.

Which brings us to the real issue: motivation. The human circadian rhythm, hard-wired to our metabolisms, is rigged for daylight activity and sleeping at night. All major food sources are more easily accessed during the day. Even if you posit a special handwavium diet that's available at night, people would just respond by having a minority "stay up" long enough to get it. There is no carrot method for getting a society to abandon daylight. Only stick.

If it is unsafe to move in the open during the daytime, humans won't. Period. If they then need to search for food, they will do so at night, and it will take them longer than during the day, exaggerating the nocturnal nature of their lifestyle. Historically, this has actually happened a number of times during the last hundred years, mostly when associated with ethnic cleansing or genocide. Unfortunately, for just the same reasons, this is likely impossible as a long-term phenomenon.

The threat enforcing nocturnality must be both an insoluble danger (i.e. a wall around your farm and groups with spears are futile), and night blind. That reduces it to [1] other humans, [2] sunlight itself being dangerous, and [3] aliens who for some reason don't use nightvision or thermal imaging. So one option that's necessarily impermanent and two that are ASB (aside from other problems).

Sorry, I really tried. I just can't figure it.
 
Albinism...

IIRC, there's a tribe in central Africa that's got a significant proportion of albinos.

AFAIR, they just dress carefully and stay out of direct sunshine. But, if the geology was favourable, they might switch to a troglodyte existence by day...

( Think N Africa, and the 'pit' houses, where StarWars' sequence was filmed... )
 
Doesn't the human body actually rely quite strongly on the Sun for energy collection? Surely a nocturnal culture would be hampered significantly by being extremely weak, to the point of lethargy? It would be like a world where the entire population suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Common sense says that in that situation, the civilisation would by nature fail to make much cultural progress, and might even struggle to adapt to either a hunter-gatherer or agrarian way of life, since pre-modern times the building-blocks, vocation-wise, of any culture involved labour-intensive jobs to provide food, money, shelter etc and a nocturnal culture would frankly not have the strength to fill any of these roles. You could be looking at a society that simply can't provide the food for itself to stay alive...
 
I think that it would be needed very strong pressure from an environment to get humans into nocturnal way of life. Let's say that there is a series of adaptation in phorusracids that allow them to repell and invasion of mammal carnivores and even to spread into North America. Let's say they become more social and while the single bird cannot win with large cat or bear, the whole flock can repell even whole cat families. So when humans cross the Beringia they find no sabertooths and lions but horrible birds who prey at day. The tribes who expand into the lands of tropics need to gather food and wander at night and to hide at day in kind of fortified encampments or on high trees.
 
The tribes who expand into the lands of tropics need to gather food and wander at night and to hide at day in kind of fortified encampments or on high trees.

So they don't expand into the tropics which means that South America is not colonised and thus the mega fauna survived there. As for a fortified encampment, that is going take more effort than your average hunter gatherer band can expand especially as they have to move from one site to another.
 
Doesn't the human body actually rely quite strongly on the Sun for energy collection?

The human body needs at least 15 minutes of sunlight to convert 7-dehydrocholesterol to vitamin-D3. A person can get Vitamin-D3 from other sources like milk.
 
Desert wanderers that are trying to avoid the intense day time heat might become much more nocturnal.
 
I think it's unlikely. Modern research shows that even if you get 8 hours of sleep during the day, people who work at night are still not as healthy and suffer from more problems like heart trouble than people who work in the day.
 
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