Overview
- In a paper in American Antiquity, a Colorado State University researcher reports that Native American hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains used dice more than 12,000 years ago, older than any known Old World examples by over 6,000 years.
- The oldest pieces come from Folsom-period sites in present-day Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico and date to roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years ago.
- These dice were two-sided “binary lots,” small marked bone pieces tossed in groups to yield simple counts based on which face landed up.
- Using an attribute-based checklist derived from Stewart Culin’s 1907 survey of historic Native games, the study reclassified older finds and identified more than 600 diagnostic and probable dice across 57 sites in 12 U.S. states.
- The research argues that dice games persisted for millennia and served as social tools for trade, alliance-building, and shared play, while also showing deliberate, rule-based use of randomness long before formal probability theory.