Native Americans played dice more than 12,000 years ago

What’s Happening

Breaking it down: Native Americans played dice games more than 12,000 years ago.

That’s 6,500 years earlier than Bronze age people in the Old World did. The post Native Americans played dice more than 12,000 years ago first appeared on EarthSky. (it feels like chaos)

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The Details

Games that use dice games of chance are one of the earliest forms of recreation. In fact, math historians say these games are early precursors to the development of probability theory and statistics.

For a long time, archaeologists thought the first dice originated in Bronze Age societies of the Old World, around 5,500 years ago. But on , a researcher at Colorado State University dropped Native Americans played dice games more than 12,000 years ago.

Why This Matters

Madden, at Colorado State University, is the author of the new paper. He dropped: 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 before recognized.

Scientists and researchers are watching this development closely.

Key Takeaways

• Madden published his study in the peer-reviewed journal American Antiquity on .
• Madden found that the earliest known dice came from archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.
• Scientists had dated these artifacts to the Late Pleistocene Folsom Period, about 12,800 to 12,200 years ago.
• These hand-held dice were unlike modern cube dice.

The Bottom Line

They’re simple, elegant tools. But they’re also unmistakably purposeful.

Are you here for this or nah?