Humans began gambling 12,000 years ago, experts say – after discovering dice that date back to the last Ice Age.
A team from Colorado State University have unearthed the earliest evidence of two–sided dice crafted from small pieces of bone.
They were originally found at an archaeological site on the western Great Plains of America, predating the current oldest known dice by more than 6,000 years.
The discovery indicates that gambling and games of chance have been a persistent feature of North American culture since the end of the last Ice Age, experts say.
‘Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,’ researcher Robert Madden said.
‘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 team said the findings don’t suggest Ice Age hunter–gatherers were working out complicated laws of probability.
‘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,’ they said. ‘That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.’
The dice pictured here date back around 12,000 years to the Late Pleistocene, marking the earliest evidence of two–sided dice crafted from small pieces of bone
For their study, published in the journal American Antiquity, the researchers re–examined artefacts long labelled as possible ‘gaming pieces’ or that had been otherwise overlooked.
In total, they identified nearly 600 probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory.
The earliest examples found in the study date to roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years ago.
Unlike modern cubic dice, these were two–sided dice known as ‘binary lots’ that were carefully crafted, small pieces of bone.
They were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, made small enough to be held in the hand and would have been tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
The two ‘faces’ of the dice were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, colouration or other visible modifications – much like heads or tails on a coin.
Sets of these dice would have been cast together, with scores determined by how many landed with the ‘counting’ face up.
‘They’re simple, elegant tools,’ Mr Madden said. ‘But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual byproducts of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes.’
Dice have been found at 57 archaeological sites across a 12–state region, dating across thousands of years and a variety of different cultures, the team said
The research also documents the remarkable breadth, as well as the persistence, of Native American dice games.
Dice have been found at 57 archaeological sites across a 12–state region, dating across thousands of years and a variety of different cultures, the team said.
‘Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule–governed spaces for ancient Native Americans,’ Mr Madden concluded.
‘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.’
