In circular time structures, simple, orderly sequences are difficult to determine—the old chicken- and-egg problem. Is dawn before dusk or is dusk before dawn? Is midnight before noon or is noon before midnight? It seems easier when events lie closer to each other: dawn occurs before noon, dusk after noon. But even these apparent certainties are not necessarily correct. If the cooling-off at the end of the day influenced the weather on the next day, then the rain at lunchtime would be (partly) “caused” by the prior dusk, which would then be before and not after noon—the day is indeed a circular structure. This temporal chicken-and-egg problem is a good reason for challenging the early-bird wisdom. As long as all individuals have similar daily routines (in other words, as long as they are similar chronotypes), the earliest bird has an advantage over anyone getting up later. This was probably true for most preindustrial societies; hence the persistence of the early-bird proverbs. If the distribution of chronotypes becomes as broad as that shown in the first chapter for Central Europe today, then the temporal chicken-and-egg problem starts to apply to the hunt for resources. A small number of very early birds in the population would wake up on their own between four and five in the morning, but even more very late chronotypes would still be awake. There is no reason why these extreme late types couldn’t gather all the mushrooms before the early risers arrived in the forest. They could then go to bed and sell the mushrooms to the early birds in the afternoon. They would even have a monopoly on mushrooms because the next good crop wouldn’t have grown until the next morning. If you have difficulties with the mushroom metaphor, then think of the impact that stock exchanges have on each other. The last stock exchange of the day, Wall Street, influences the first stock exchange of the next day in Tokyo, which in turn will have an impact on all the others between Tokyo and New York.