Gambling's family tree may have a new root, and it's in ancient North America. A new study in the journal American Antiquity argues that Native Americans in the present-day US Southwest were using dice and grappling with ideas of chance and probability roughly 12,000 years ago—about 6,000 years before anything comparable shows up in Europe, Africa, or Asia. Author Robert Madden, a 62-year-old former trial lawyer turned archaeology doctoral student at Colorado State University, didn't unearth new artifacts, per NBC News. Instead, he sifted through decades of excavation reports and imposed consistent criteria for what counts as dice.
Madden traced two-sided, meticulously shaped bone and wooden pieces back to ice age-era Folsom culture sites in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, then forward in an unbroken line to modern Native communities. The dice are "simple, elegant tools," Madden says, per Phys.org. "But they're also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual by-products of bone-working. They were made to generate random outcomes."
Oral histories and early written accounts describe gambling as both risky and socially or spiritually significant, with some traditions depicting deities doing some gaming themselves. Madden's work suggests prehistoric Native Americans may have been the first to systematically engage with concepts such as the law of large numbers. "What we're really looking at here is an intellectual accomplishment," he tells NBC.
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