Ice age Native Americans 'were using dice to gamble'

Native American hunter-gatherers were using dice for gaming and a form of gambling more than 6,000 years before the practice appeared in Europe, Asia or Africa, a study argues.

- Mark Brown

The research finds that dice were being made and used on the western Great Plains of America at the end of the last ice age, more than 12,000 years ago. It had been thought that the earliest known examples of dice were in bronze age societies of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley.

Robert Madden, a PhD student at Colorado State University (CSU) and author of the study, said: “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations.

“What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes and using those outcomes in structured games thousands of years earlier than previously recognised.”