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Native Americans Used Dice Thousands of Years Before the Bronze Age
Researchers identified more than 600 flat, two-sided dice that Native Americans likely used for gambling and games of chance.
- On April 2, a Colorado State University study published in American Antiquity revealed that Native Americans used dice for gaming roughly 12,800 years ago, marking the earliest known evidence of such objects in human history.
- Previously categorized as 'gaming pieces,' these flat, two-sided discs were found at sites across Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico dating to the Late Pleistocene, as they lacked traditional cube shapes.
- Lead study author Robert J. Madden created a morphological test using Stewart Culin's 1907 analysis of 293 historic Native American dice sets, identifying 565 diagnostic dice and 94 probable dice across 45 sites.
- Madden suggests these games acted as 'social technologies' fostering interaction among nomadic bands, with Ice Age people intentionally using random outcomes 6,000 years before Old World societies recognized probability.
- Archaeologist Walter Crist called the research 'crucial' for prehistoric archaeology, though University of California, Davis professor Jelmer Eerkens cautioned that confirming function requires archaeological context beyond artifact morphology alone.
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Dice Are 6,000 Years Older Than Previously Believed, Study Says
New research published in the journal American Antiquity last week posits that the first dice appeared more than 12,000 years ago, much earlier than previously believed. Made by Native Americans, the Pleistocene-era pieces predate all other archeological findings of dice, most of which come from the Bronze Age, by over 6,000 years. Dice represent a recognition of randomness; tools that wield unpredictability. “At the end of the last Ice Age, the…
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Total News Sources12
Leaning Left3Leaning Right0Center8Last UpdatedBias Distribution73% Center
Bias Distribution
- 73% of the sources are Center
73% Center
L 27%
C 73%
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