The dice could mean people were playing with probability thousands of years earlier than thought

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Ancient cultures across the globe have been playing games of chance — using dice — far, far longer than historians had ever realized, a new study finds. Researchers turned up these gaming pieces from as far back as 12,000 years ago. That makes them the oldest known dice.

These came from western North America. Until their discovery, the oldest known dice were from Mesopotamia, an ancient region in what is now Iraq. The oldest of those were only about 5,500 years old.

Many Native American cultures have a rich history of dice games and still play them today.

Such games could have helped foster social connection, says archaeologist Robert Weiner, who was not part of the new study. If you meet strangers, “how are you going to interact?” he asks. Dice games could have offered one way for strangers to bond. Weiner works at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

But until now, the roots of early American dice games had been fuzzy. Robert Madden hoped to track down those origins. In the April 2 American Antiquity, he describes the search for the earliest dice in what is now the mainland United States.

Madden, too, is an archaeologist. He works at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He started his search by sifting through records of Native American artifacts. He was scouting for objects that might be dice.

He set rules for sorting out possible dice. Most Native American dice are two-sided with at least one side marked. So that’s what Madden looked for. He rejected objects with holes. These might have been part of jewelry. Any die candidates also had to be small enough to fit in one’s hand.

In all, 565 objects met all those criteria. An additional 94 objects were probably dice but would need more details to be sure.

The items came from 57 archaeological sites across 12 U.S. states in the Great Plains and American West. Most of the promising objects were 450 to 2,000 years old. About 31 were 2,000 to 8,000 years old. And at least 14 artifacts dated as far back as 12,000 years ago. Those oldest ones came from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.

Madden then traveled to examine the oldest of these artifacts in person. He found some objects that had not yet been described or linked to gaming.

“It was amazing to hold these pieces of deep history in my hand,” Madden says. In-person inspections confirmed to him that these ancient objects were in fact dice. Each was made of bone, worn smooth by use and time. Lines had been carefully etched on one side. Some had faint traces of red pigment to mark the different sides.

Especially notable: They looked much like more modern Native American dice.

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

Weiner agrees. “I don’t think there’s a compelling alternative explanation for many of these objects,” he says.

The new study likely understates the true diversity, in space and time, of dice in Native American cultures. After colonial contact, settlers documented 18 tribes in the eastern U.S. that played dice games. Yet Madden’s search turned up no dice from there. Future research should explore that region, he says.

Finding the oldest dice also pushes back when people first seem to have been experimenting with the concept of probability. It highlights Native American contributions to early intellectual developments, Madden says. That Native Americans used dice to generate randomness this long ago, he says, “is a very exciting connection to make.”