Humans have been playing since the Ice Age

A new archaeological discovery shows that Native Americans explored probability through games of chance much earlier than their Old World counterparts.

By Joseph Howlett edited by Lee Billings

The history of gaming goes back further than anyone imagined. This new discovery radically changes the date of a key intellectual moment in the history of human culture: the recognition that certain events in nature are random, under no one’s control.

All games of chance, from Yahtzee to horse racing betting, rely on probability, a relatively unintuitive concept. Archaeologists have therefore taken care to document the first examples, notably the dice used for games played by North Americans as early as 2,000 years ago. They discovered similar-looking objects at even older sites, but these pieces individually were too small and nondescript, and too isolated in the archaeological record, to be positively identified.

A new analysis by archaeologist Robert J. Madden, published today in the journal American antiquity, that changes that. Madden has combed through these rare records, confirming the oldest known dice and establishing an unbroken and previously hidden lineage of gambling dating back at least 12,000 years, 6,000 before any equivalent in the Old World.

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“This is the most exciting article I’ve seen on North American archeology in the last five years,” says Robert Weiner, an archaeologist at Dartmouth College. “To demonstrate this Native American contribution to world intellectual history is fantastic. »

Madden became interested in the origins of gambling when he saw a line in a 2001 article by the late anthropologist Warren DeBoer alluding to a number of small objects found at archaeological sites in North America that were thought to be possible game pieces.

Archaeologists had identified later two-sided “dice” – essentially objects with a “head” and “tail” side, like modern coins – through ethnographic accounts of early European settlers observing Native Americans playing games.

The games “were often noisy affairs with huge groups of people around,” Madden says. The rules were often too complicated for inexperienced spectators to follow, but they involved rolling a bunch of dice and seeing how many came up “heads.”

Although many discoverers of older objects suspected they had found antecedents of the same tools, they were not sure. “There’s this elusive uncertainty,” Madden says. “Everyone says, ‘I don’t even know what we’re looking at here.'”

Madden used these later confirmed specimens to establish a set of criteria for the appearance of these dice. Some had distinctive ticks etched along their outer edges, while others looked like small sticks cut lengthwise, with one flat side and one curved side – shapes their creators had deliberately designed to produce random results.

Then he went through the record looking for those characteristics in the previous tracks. That meant spending countless hours combing through online databases to identify features in photos of tiny pieces found scattered across the continent over the last century. “It took forever,” he said. The oldest dice specimens confirmed by Madden come from sites in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, but the study notes that the apparent concentration in the American West might simply come from where these sites were preserved and discovered.

Madden credits generations of archaeologists who did the initial work of building the archive and online databases for making it available to a single researcher. “I don’t even think this could have been done 25 years ago.”

He hopes his work will begin to crystallize this scattered data set so others can investigate further. “That seems to me to be an area that really needs a lot of study,” he says. “The goal was just to break through.”

Madden’s discovery “makes dice games played by Roman soldiers, or those found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, look young in comparison,” says Gabriel Yanicki of Carleton University.

But “it’s about more than just turning back the clock,” Yanicki says. This confirms and extends something unique to the Americas: humans here have long used gambling as a social excuse for groups to come together and trade, even without sharing a language. “This universal acceptance of the economic utility of gaming is somewhat mysterious, compared to other regions of the world,” says Yanicki.

Additionally, Weiner points out, games represent “a way for people to engage, both intellectually and spiritually, in this universal human question of why things happen.”

The game requires a rudimentary understanding, or at least recognition, of the concept of probability. Madden expected that, like young children who struggle to understand chance, early civilizations would have viewed every event as resulting from a predictable force. “We have to take a step towards this idea that there are things that have no cause,” he says. Probability theory arrived late in the history of mathematics. It was developed only 300 to 500 years ago, by mathematicians trying to understand how games of chance worked.

But the game forces you to believe that some things in nature are truly unpredictable. Gambling reflects the invention of a cultural technology that is the direct ancestor of all modern statistics – and of all empirical science.

“When you start tossing a coin and noting the results, you’re kind of invoking chance,” Madden says. “You can start to see these patterns emerge, and more than just seeing them, you can exploit them. »