Native Americans played dice more than 12,000 years ago
Games that use dice – games of chance – are one of the earliest forms of recreation. In fact, math historians say these games are early precursors to the development of probability theory and statistics. For a long time, archaeologists thought the first dice originated in Bronze Age societies of the Old World, around 5,500 years ago. But on April 2, 2026, a researcher at Colorado State University said Native Americans played dice games more than 12,000 years ago.
Robert J. Madden, at Colorado State University, is the author of the new paper. He 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 recognized.
Madden published his study in the peer-reviewed journal American Antiquity on April 2, 2026.
The earliest dice
Madden found that the earliest known dice came from archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. Scientists had dated these artifacts to the Late Pleistocene Folsom Period, about 12,800 to 12,200 years ago.
These hand-held dice were unlike modern cube dice. Instead, they were oval- or rectangular-shaped two-sided dice, known as binary lots. People meticulously crafted them from flat or slightly rounded pieces of bone or wood.
Binary lots had carvings and other treatments, such as burn marks or painted coloring, on their surfaces. One side was the “counting” side, with distinct markings. In addition, when players threw the dice, it landed reliably on one side or the other, providing one out of two outcomes. You could imagine a player throwing several of these dice from a basket and getting a score based on how many landed with the counting side facing up.
Madden said:
They’re simple, elegant tools. But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual byproducts of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes.
Identifying binary lots
How did Madden conclude that the artifacts were binary lots? He created a checklist of features by studying 293 sets of known historic Native American dice. Stewart Culin, an ethnographer, had documented these objects in 1907, in a monograph called Games of the North American Indians.
Using that checklist, Madden systematically studied Native American artifacts in online databases and libraries. Some of them, he discovered, were binary lots. In all, he identified more than 600 dice from North American prehistoric archaeological sites, spanning in time from the end of the last Ice Age to when Europeans first came in contact with Native Americans.
Madden commented:
In most cases, these objects had already been excavated and published. What was missing wasn’t the evidence, it was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.
A long history of dice games in Native American culture
Prior to Madden’s research, binary lots had a 2,000-year-old history in North America. But now he’s identified so many more, dating back to 12,000 years ago. They came from 57 archaeological sites across 12 states. And they spanned a timeframe from Paleo-Indian times, 12,000 years ago, to the Late Prehistoric Age, before the first Europeans arrived to North America. Moreover, Madden found that different Native American cultures with varying subsistence practices used these dice.
Madden observed that these dice were an important part of Native American culture for thousands of years:
Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans. They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances and manage uncertainty. In that sense, they functioned as powerful social technologies.
Playing Native American dice games
What were the games like? In a podcast interview, Madden described them:
There were many ways [to play]. That’s one of the things that’s really very interesting is that, in fact, the rules were baffling to the Europeans who documented these games. They would come and watch the games, and the players would move so fast. There would always be two players and then there’d be a referee and scorekeepers. There would also be spectators gathered around. It was a raucous affair. And there’d be all kinds of side betting going on.
The rules could be complex, and they could be very different. But the basics of the game were simple and similar. So, as long as people felt that they understood the game well enough to understand that it was equal conditions for everyone, they could come together and play.
The legacy of these ancient games continues to this day. Here’s a video of kids playing the Navajo Stick Game using flat wooden dice.
The significance of dice games
In the interview, Madden talked about what these games say about the intellectual development of ancient humans.
People think dice is just a game. But what people don’t realize is that when humans start making dice, that is the first evidence that we have of people engaging with and starting to understand concepts of randomness and probability. And not just understand it, but use it to create these equal conditions, to create a situation where people feel that they can relate equally to other people.
When we see the origins of dice, we’re literally seeing the origins of probabilistic thinking. That’s always been thought to have begun in the Old World, in the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This research shows that Native Americans were making dice, generating random outcomes and using those random streams of probability and harnessing them in games of chance 6,000 years earlier. So, if we want to understand the history of probabilistic thinking, we now need to look into the New World at the end of the last Ice Age.
Bottom line: Native Americans have been playing games using dice for more than 12,000 years, 6,500 years earlier than Bronze age people in the Old World.
Read more: Scientists unearth 1st direct evidence of 1st Americans
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