12,000 Year Old Dice Discovered in North America
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These objects do not resemble the six-sided dice we use today but you can compare throwing one of these ancient dice to a modern day coin toss.
The recent discovery of ancient dice made from wood and bone - published in American Antiquity - sheds new light on the playfulness and the penchant for games of chance of human societies in the deep past.
Archaeologist Richard J. Madden identified 565 dice from sites across North America including Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. They dated from the 19th century all the way back to 12,000 years ago. The recognition of these artefacts as dice - which Madden believes shows evidence of games of chance and gambling - pushes back the material evidence for human play by millennia, as his study indicates that Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else.
These objects do not resemble the six-sided dice we use today. Instead, they are binary: flat, round, or rectangular pieces marked on one side and blank on the other. In effect, you can compare throwing one of these ancient dice to a coin toss - although this discovery also underscores that dice are much older than coins.
However, isn't it true that play frequently exists for play’s sake? Sometimes you flip the coin to win it, but often you flip it just for fun. Even though it may not be the case that Native American people, in the very distant past, were running prehistoric gambling rings, this is still an exciting find.
