The oldest known dice in the world are around 12,000 years old

THE The oldest known dice in the world are around 12,000 years old. and western North America, a new study suggests. Before the discovery, the oldest dice on record came from Mesopotamia, made around 5,500 years ago. This pushes back the invention of dice by about 6,000 years.

Many Native American cultures have a rich history of dice games and still play them today. These games were historically tools of social cohesionincreasingly important as isolated groups of people began to grow and mix more, says Robert Weiner, an archaeologist at Dartmouth College.

“How will you interact with strangers?” » he said. Dice games might have helped, but their earliest roots in Native American cultures were unclear.

The new study, published April 2 in American antiquitypresents the first systematic attempt to recover early dice in what is now the continental United States.

Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, sifted through existing archives of Native American artifacts in search of the nation’s oldest dice. He was looking for objects that researchers thought were related to games or dice.

He then set criteria for sorting the possible dice. Native American dice are mostly two-sided, called binary lots, so the objects had to be two-sided, of certain shapes, with at least one side marked, that could fit in the hand. The objects also could not have holes, which could indicate that they were used as jewelry.

This search yielded 565 objects meeting all criteria and 94 that were likely dice but require clearer evidence for definitive identification. The objects came from 57 archaeological sites across 12 states, all located in the Great Plains and western United States. Most were from 2,000 to 450 years ago, but at least 31 were from 8,000 to 2,000 years ago, and at least 14 were 12,000 years ago.

Madden traveled the country to examine the oldest of them in person. In some collections, he found plausible dice in the older age range that had not been documented in the literature or previously identified as game-related.

“It was amazing to hold these pieces of deep history in my hand,” Madden says. In-person examinations confirmed to him that these ancient bone objects worn by use and time, with carefully engraved lines on one side, were dice. Some had faint traces of red pigment used to differentiate the sides.

They obviously had the same design as newer versions, including some modern Native American dice.

“If you took dice from 2,000 years ago and prehistoric dice and put them in a bag and shook it, it would be really hard to tell the difference between them,” he says. “They look a lot alike.”

Weiner, who was not part of the study, agrees. “I don’t think there is a compelling alternative explanation for many of these objects,” he says.

The study likely underestimates the true diversity, in space and time, of dice in Native American cultures, Madden says. After colonial contact, settlers documented that 18 tribes in the eastern United States played dice games, but Madden’s research yielded no dice from that region. Future research should explore this, he says.

The discovery of the oldest dice also pushes back the period when humans first experimented with probability and highlights Native Americans’ contributions to early intellectual developments, Madden says. The fact that Native Americans used dice to generate chance so long ago, he said, “is a very exciting connection to make.”