Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else, study says

"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."

"These findings don't claim that ice age hunter gatherers were doing formal probability theory. But they were intentionally creating, observing and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers."

Native American hunter-gatherers created and used dice for gaming and gambling over 12,000 years ago, significantly earlier than previously believed. The study reveals that these ancient groups had a foundational understanding of chance and probability. Dice were made from wood or bone and used in structured games, facilitating social interactions among disparate groups. This challenges the notion that dice and probability originated solely in the Old World, highlighting the importance of these practices in the development of social bonds and probabilistic thinking.

Read at www.theguardian.com