So far we have heard that lots of people nowadays are not getting much sleep and they blame TVs blaring, cell phones buzzing or excess of coffee for less sleep. But a new study challenges the conventional wisdom about how much sleep a person needs.

Researchers during their study found that three ancient groups of hunter-gatherers that live in different parts of the world do not sleep more. By saying this researchers do not mean that these groups sleep less but they do not sleep more.

UCLA psychiatry professor Jerome Siegel told Reuters that those traditional people on average sleep a little less than 6.5 hours every night. They also do not take regular naps like modern humans.

These traditional people go to sleep at dark and this shows that they have sleeping habits almost similar to that of ours. The short sleep of these populations challenges the belief that modern world people sleep less, said researchers.

“This has important implications for the idea that we need to take sleeping pills because sleep has been reduced from its 'natural level' by the widespread use of electricity, TV, the Internet, and so on”, said Siegel.

Researchers for the study looked at three different traditional human hunter-gatherer societies: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia, PBS reported.

Sleeping habits of 94 individuals was tracked around the clock to collect data representing 1,165 days in all. The sleep time of the group averaged between 5.7 and 7.1 hours, with between 6.9 and 8.5 hours between the beginning and end of the sleep period.