Overview
- The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday in American Antiquity, identifies two-sided dice about 12,000 years old from the western Great Plains as the oldest known worldwide.
- Researcher Robert J. Madden built a checklist from 293 historic Native American dice and, applying it to old finds and museum pieces, logged 565 diagnostic and 94 probable dice from 57 sites across 12 states.
- The earliest examples come from Folsom-period layers dated roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years ago at sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, including Agate Basin in Wyoming.
- The artifacts are small bone or wooden pieces with contrasting faces that were tossed in sets to produce binary results, much like flipping several coins to count how many land on the marked side.
- Experts say the work shifts the earliest known use of dice back by about 6,000 years and highlights social uses of gambling, while noting possible alternate functions and regional sampling bias that future searches should test.