Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else, study says | Archaeology

Native American hunter-gatherers were using dice for gaming and gambling 6,000 years before the practice appeared anywhere else, according to a new study.

He says the dice were made and used in the western great plains of North America more than 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.

The earliest examples of membranes were thought to be in bronze age societies in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley.

Robert Madden, author of the study“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as old-world innovations. What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups made objects deliberately designed to produce random outcomes and used those outcomes in structured games thousands of years earlier than previously known,” he said.

This suggests that ancient Native Americans had “a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability” and as a result “were the first movers in humanity’s emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts.”

Games of chance and gambling enable disparate groups to “interact, exchange goods, information and friends, and form new social ties,” the study says.

“These findings do not suggest that ice age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory. But they were deliberately creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leverage probabilistic regularities such as the law of large numbers. This is important for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking,” said Madden, a doctoral student in archeology at Colorado State University.

The oldest samples identified in the study come from late Pleistocene archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.

By 12,800 years old, two-sided dice were made of wood or bone and thrown onto the playing surface in groups, the study says.

Madden’s research is based on re-examining ancient artifacts in collections that are often labeled “game pieces” or overlooked altogether. He argues that these misclassified or ignored objects are dice.

he tells CSU’s The Audit podcast He said he spent a long time regularly poring over online databases and libraries to find examples of what he claimed were dice.

“It was like a treasure hunt, and I just kept looking for and tracking samples,” he said. “Finally, nearly three years later, I compiled the data set that forms this paper, tracing this practice as far back as possible from a well-documented historical period over the last 2000 years.

“We find that the incredible persistence of this practice extends back to the late Pleistocene, which is more than 6,000 years older than the oldest known membrane in the ancient world, dating back to about 12,000 years ago.”

The newspaper uses the word gambling; But this is not gambling as we know it today.

“The way we think about gambling is like you bet against the house at the casino,” Madden said. “And as we all know, when you play against the house the odds always tip slightly in the house’s favor.

“These games are one-on-one, no house. It’s me against you. It’s a fair game, everyone has equal opportunities, equal conditions, and was used as a form of barter… especially between groups of people who don’t come into frequent contact with each other.”

Article titled Probability in the Pleistocene Published in American Antiquity magazine.