Scientists say Native Americans were playing with dice and gambling long before anyone else. (SWNS)
By Stephen Beech
Native Americans were making dice and gambling thousands of years before anyone else in the world, according to new research.
Evidence reveals that the earliest known dice in human history were made and used by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.
That was long before the earliest known dice in Bronze Age societies in Europe, Africa and Asia, scientists say.
The new study, published in the journal American Antiquity, indicates that dice, games of chance, and gambling have been a "persistent" feature of Native American culture for at least the last 12,000 years.
The earliest examples were discovered at Late Pleistocene Folsom-period archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The artifacts predate the earliest known Old World dice by more than 6,000 years, say scientists.
Study author Robert Madden said: “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations.
“What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”
The earliest examples identified in the study come from Folsom sites dating to around 12,800 to 12,200 years ago.
Unlike modern cubic dice, they were two-sided “binary lots” - carefully crafted, small pieces of bone that were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, sized to be held in the hand and tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
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The two faces of the binary lots were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, coloration, or other visible modifications, much like heads or tails on a coin, with one face designated as the “counting” side.
When thrown, they reliably landed with one side or the other facing upward, producing a binary - or two-outcome - result.
Researchers say that sets of the dice were cast together, and scores were determined by how many landed with the counting face up.
Madden, a Ph.D. student at Colorado State University, said: “They’re simple, elegant tools.
“But they’re also unmistakably purposeful.
"These are not casual by-products of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes.”
The study introduced a new test – a checklist of measurable physical features – for identifying North American dice archaeologically.
The test was derived from a comparative analysis of 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented across the continent by ethnographer Stewart Culin in his 1907 Bureau of American Ethnology monograph, Games of the North American Indians.
Researchers applied the test systematically to the published archaeological record, essentially re-examining artifacts long labeled as possible “gaming pieces” or otherwise overlooked to determine whether they meet the new objective criteria for dice.
In most cases, Madden said the evidence had been in the archaeological record for decades, but without a clear standard for identifying dice, it had never been analyzed as part of a larger pattern.
Using the new approach, he identified more than 600 diagnostic and probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory, from the Late Pleistocene through and after the period of European contact.
Photo by William Warby via Pexels
He said: “In most cases, these objects had already been excavated and published.
“What was missing wasn’t the evidence, it was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.”
The earliest examples were examined directly in museum collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Historians of mathematics widely regard dice games as humanity’s earliest structured engagement with randomness, an intellectual precursor to probability theory, statistics, and later scientific thinking.
Until now, the origins of such practices were thought to lie exclusively in Old World complex societies beginning around 5,500 years ago.
But the new study suggests a much deeper history.
Madden said: “These findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory.
“But they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers.
"That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
The study found that dice appear at 57 archaeological sites across a 12-state region associated with a variety of different cultures.
Madden added: “Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans.
“They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances, and manage uncertainty.
"In that sense, they functioned as powerful social technologies.”