Around 2400 years ago, at the mouth of the Nile River, as the sun set, fishermen in the swamps would stretch the nets they'd used to catch fish during the day around their sleeping areas and slept beneath them.
This is one of the oldest records of mosquito nets, written by the historian Herodotus.
But humankind had been spending the night in mosquito-infested lands hundreds of thousands of years before that.
How did people sleep in an era without nets or medicine?
Smoke, leaves, ash, things applied to the body. We'll examine each of these commonly cited answers with experimental data.

▼What you'll learn from this video
• There is currently no evidence that cooking smoke protects people from mosquitoes or malaria (2007 review).
• Smoking strong-smelling herbs reduces the number of bites by 30-80%. However, the measurements were taken in the early evening, and some types of mosquitoes are unaffected.
The 77,000-year-old "mosquito-repellent bed" in Shivudu did not have any experiments testing leaves on mosquitoes (correction after rereading the paper).
The ash bed in the 200,000-year-old Border Cave. The ash repels crawling insects, not mosquitoes.
Even applying crocodile fat only repels mosquitoes for a maximum of 1 hour and 38 minutes.
A study suggests that chimpanzees sleep in trees not because of mosquitoes, but because of the humidity.
Most mosquitoes fly in the lower layers, and about 80% of bites occur while a person is sleeping.
Gambia experiment: When the hut was raised to 1m, 2m, and 3m, the number of Anopheles mosquitoes decreased from 1015 → 601 → 333 → 131 mosquitoes (84% reduction)
Herodotus wrote 2400 years ago about "sleeping in a tower"
Wind is effective not because it blows mosquitoes away, but because it tears the scent trails
Stilt houses on São Tomé, elevated beds in Arnhem Land, and the "5-meter layer of insects" in the Orinoco River
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which targets only humans, originated about 5000 years ago (with a range of 3000 to 10,000 years)
Whether agriculture increased the mosquito population is still a subject of debate
The parasite that causes severe malaria was originally a gorilla parasite
The word "canopy" originates from the Greek word for "mosquito"
"Mosquito fire" in the Manyoshu and mosquito nets in the Harima Province Fudoki. There is no historical evidence to suggest that it was introduced from Tang China during the Nara period.
Mosquito nets impregnated with medicine prevented 68% of malaria cases in Africa between 2000 and 2015 (663 million cases).
These mosquito nets are now used for fishing in 26 countries.
▼Chapters
0:00 Fishermen sleeping under nets
0:42 Scoring common answers (smoke, leaves, ash, paint)
5:42 Experiments lifting huts in trees, towers
8:44 Wind and people choosing where to sleep
11:08 When did mosquitoes start targeting humans?
14:23 The answer in the swamp without towers - nets, mosquito nets, medicine
17:33 A net that goes all the way around
▼Main references
Herodotus, *Histories*, Book 2, Section 95 - Swamp fishermen's nets and people sleeping in towers
Biran, Smith, Lines, Ensink, Cameron (2007) Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 101(11):1065-1071 — Review of cooking smoke and mosquitoes/malaria
Vernède, van Meer, Alpers (1994) Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 25(4):771-775 — Measurement of smoke from burning leaves in Papua New Guinea
Seyoum et al. (2002) Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 96(3):225-231 — Experiments on insect-repelling plants in western Kenya
Wadley, Sievers, Bamford, Goldberg, Berna, Miller (2011) Science 334:1388-1391 — Shivudu's 77,000-year-old sleeping place
Wadley et al. (2020) Science 369:863-866 — 200,000-year-old grass and ash bedding in Border Cave
Rifkin (2015) South African Archaeological Bulletin 70(201):64-75 — Insect-repellent effect of red soil (ochre)
Esmaeili et al. (2024) PLoS ONE 19(7):e0301677 — Mosquito-repellent effect and duration of animal fat
Stewart (2011) American Journal of Physical Anthropology 146:313-318 / Koops et al. (2012) International Journal of Primatology 33:356-380 — Chimpanzee bedding and mosquitoes
Gillies & Wilkes (1976) Bulletin of Entomological Research 66:5-15 — Altitude distribution of mosquitoes in West Africa
Sherrard-Smith et al. (2019) PNAS 116(30):15086-15095 — Time of bite and proportion of bites during sleep
Carrasco-Tenezaca et al. (2021) Journal of the Royal Society Interface 18:20210256 — Gambian experiment involving lifting a hut
Charlwood et al. (2003) Malaria Journal 2:45 — Stilt houses and mosquitoes on São Tomé
Hoffmann & Miller (2003) Journal of Medical Entomology 40(5):607-614 — Dilution of wind and scent
Humboldt, Personal Narrative (Bohn edition 1852), Volume 2 — Insect layers and people's lives along the Orinoco River
Rose et al. (2020) Current Biology 30:3570-3579 / Rose et al. (2023) eLife 12:e83524 — Factors and timeli...