Native Americans had dice 12,000 years ago

A big shake-up for the history of chance

It has been reported that a new study published in American Antiquity argues Native Americans were shaping games of probability in the present-day Southwestern U.S. roughly 12,000 years ago — thousands of years earlier than similar practices documented in the Old World. The claim comes from Robert Madden, a Colorado State University doctoral student and former trial lawyer, who spent years combing excavation reports and museum records. Surprise? A little. Revolutionary? Quite possibly.

What the paper rests on

Madden did not unearth new artifacts. Instead, he reassembled scattered finds: small two-sided bone and wooden pieces from Folsom-era sites in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming dated between about 12,255 and 12,845 years ago. These items are carefully shaped to produce random outcomes and often marked or colored to denote sides. Previous literature had set the clockback at around 2,000 years; Madden’s timeline stretches that history back to the end of the last Ice Age. It has been reported that the study establishes criteria for identifying dice in the archaeological record — a tidy bit of taxonomy that changes the map of where humans first played the odds.

Why this matters — and what we should be cautious about

If the analysis holds up, it reframes when and where people began thinking in terms of chance, randomness and probability — concepts foundational to later science, economics and even gambling lore. There’s also an emotional through-line: Native oral histories from the Southwest already talk about gambling as social and sacred, sometimes involving deities. This work stitches those living traditions to a very deep past. Caveat? The claim rests on reinterpretation of old finds, not new digs, so scholars will rightly scrutinize dating, context and whether those objects were used the way Madden suggests. Still — who knew the odds would land us here?

Sources: nbcnews.com, Hacker News