History & Archaeology

A groundbreaking new study has revealed that the world's oldest known dice were crafted and used by Native American hunter-gatherers more than 12,000 years ago. These ancient gaming pieces, discovered in the western Great Plains of North America, predate the earliest known dice from Bronze Age societies in the Old World by over 6,000 years. The remarkable findings suggest that indigenous peoples were engaging in complex games of chance and exploring probability thousands of years before the concept emerged in written mathematics. The research, conducted by Colorado State University Ph.D. student Robert J. Madden and published in the journal American Antiquity, identified the earliest examples of these dice at Late Pleistocene Folsom-period archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico