← Back to all posts
🎲

Native Americans were making dice and gaming thousands of years before anyone else

So, this is genuinely exciting: new research shows that the oldest known dice in human history were made over 12,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains - more than 6,000 years before the earliest dice from the Old World. These were small, carefully crafted two-sided bone pieces, tossed in groups to generate random outcomes in structured games of chance. Now, what makes this even better is that researchers developed a brand new identification checklist, and using it they found more than 600 dice across 57 archaeological sites spanning all of North America. Which brings me to the big takeaway - gaming and probability weren't Old World inventions at all, they've been part of Native American culture for an astonishingly long time.
Read the original article ↗