Overview
- American Antiquity published the study Thursday, reporting two‑sided dice used by hunter‑gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago, thousands of years before Old World examples.
- The earliest pieces are small bone or wood slivers with two distinct faces that were tossed in sets, and players scored by counting how many landed with the marked side up.
- Author Robert J. Madden built a four‑part identification checklist from Stewart Culin’s 1907 catalog, then re‑examined reports and museum collections to log 565 diagnostic dice and 94 probable ones across 57 sites.
- The oldest diagnostic examples come from Folsom‑period sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico dated to roughly 12,800–12,200 years ago, and the record suggests games helped strangers trade, share news, and form ties, with many historic versions played by women.
- The paper is a reanalysis of existing finds and notes limits, including possible other uses like divination, a single less‑certain Clovis‑era object, and likely preservation gaps in the East, which could spur targeted digs and direct dating tests.