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Coop

The story

Roosters had this job for 8,000 years.

Four short facts you'll read while you're setting the app up.

01

Chickens were alarm clocks before they were dinner

About 8,000 years ago, people in Southeast Asia started keeping wild jungle fowl near their villages. The eggs were nice. The more useful bit was that the rooster shouted every morning and woke the whole place up.

02

The Romans named an hour after him

They had no clocks, so they split the night into shifts. One of them was called cockcrow, and it meant the hour just before sunrise. If someone said "meet me at cockcrow", everybody knew when that was.

03

Roosters know dawn is coming before it gets here

Researchers in Japan kept roosters in dim light with no sunrise at all. The roosters still crowed about two hours before dawn, every day. They've got a body clock that handles mornings better than most of us do.

04

They invented snooze. I didn't.

First bells, then radios, then phones — and a button you could hit half asleep. You can't snooze me off. I'm here so you actually get up.

Sources

  1. About 8,000 years is a round number people use for when jungle fowl started living near villages in Southeast Asia. Specialists still argue. A 2022 review of the bones puts clear domestication later, around 3,500 years ago. Peters et al., “The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (2022).
  2. The Romans named a watch of the night gallicinium — cockcrow. It is a time of day in Latin, not only a bird. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 5.31; Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “gallicinium.”
  3. Researchers at Nagoya University kept roosters in dim light with no sunrise. The birds still crowed about two hours before dawn, on a body clock. Shimmura and Yoshimura, “Circadian clock determines the timing of rooster crowing,” Current Biology 23 (2013).
  4. The snooze button is modern. A rooster never offered one.