2026-04-02 14:04:08
Humans have been rolling the dice for a very long time.
Experts say gambling dates back at least 12,000 years – after ancient dice made from bone were discovered in North America.
Researchers from Colorado State University uncovered the tiny two-sided dice at sites across the western Great Plains, pushing the origins of games of chance back more than 6,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The artefacts date to the end of the last Ice Age – meaning prehistoric humans may have been taking risks long before casinos existed.
The study, published in American Antiquity, identified nearly 600 probable dice from different periods of North American prehistory.
Unlike modern cubes, these were flat or slightly rounded pieces of bone, often oval or rectangular, with markings to distinguish each side – similar to heads or tails on a coin.
They were likely tossed together, with scores based on how many landed a certain way.
Researcher Robert Madden said: “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations.”
But the findings tell a different story.
He added: “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.”
Scientists stress these early gamblers weren’t crunching complex maths – but they did understand randomness.
The team said: “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.”
Madden added: “They’re simple, elegant tools… These are not casual byproducts of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes.”
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