The idea that humans have long been fascinated with chance—rolling dice, testing luck, gambling on uncertain outcomes—is a prominent feature in modern culture. However, new research suggests that this relationship with randomness extends far deeper into our past than previously imagined, dating back more than 12,000 years.
A new empirical study published in American Antiquity argues that some of the earliest known dice, and by extension, structured games of chance, appeared among Native American populations during the Late Pleistocene, predating similar developments in the Old World by millennia.
The evidence not only challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of probability but also suggests that ancient North American societies were already engaging with concepts of randomness and uncertainty at a surprisingly sophisticated level.
“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” study author and Colorado State University Ph.D. student, Robert J. Madden, said in a press release. “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.”
A 12,000-Year-Old Game of Chance
Using a dataset of 293 documented sets of historic Native American dice, originally cataloged in 1907, the study specifies clear physical criteria for identifying dice in ancient contexts. These include being two-sided objects, often made of bone or wood, with distinguishable faces and shapes suited for casting by hand.
Armed with this framework, Madden combed through decades of archaeological reports and identified 659 diagnostic and probable dice across 57 sites spanning 12 states in North America.
The most striking discoveries emerge from sites associated with the Folsom culture, hunter-gatherer groups that lived on the Great Plains near the end of the last Ice Age. Artifacts meeting the definition of dice were found at sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, dating back roughly 12,800 to 12,200 years.
These early objects weren’t crude or ambiguous. According to Madden, they exhibit the same defining characteristics as later, well-documented dice used in games of chance, suggesting continuity not only in form but also in function.
These results indicate that long before the development of formal mathematics, humans in North America were already experimenting with randomness in structured ways.
“They’re simple, elegant tools,” Madden said. “But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual byproducts of bone working. They were made to generate random outcomes.”
Probability Before Mathematics
Historians of science have long linked dice and gambling to the eventual development of probability theory. In Europe and the Middle East, dice games played a key role in the development of early mathematical thinking about chance.
However, this new evidence suggests that this intellectual trajectory may not have been confined to the Old World or even have originated there.
The study notes that these North American dice predate their earliest known Old World counterparts by thousands of years, raising the possibility that the conceptual foundations of probability emerged independently in multiple regions.
More importantly, the consistent use of these objects across time implies that ancient populations weren’t just playing games—they were engaging with the underlying principles of randomness in repeatable, rule-based systems.
A Cultural Constant Across Millennia
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of these findings is not just how early these practices appear, but how persistent they are.
From Ice Age hunter-gatherers to later agricultural societies, dice show up repeatedly across North American prehistory. The study documents their presence in every major period, from the Late Pleistocene through the Middle and Late Holocene, spanning more than 13,000 years.
This continuity suggests that games of chance were not a passing cultural novelty, but a firmly embedded social practice.
More striking is the diversity of cultures that used them. Dice appear in archaeological contexts associated with mobile hunter-gatherers, semi-sedentary groups, and fully agricultural societies alike.
In other words, gambling—and the use of randomness as a social tool—was not tied to any single way of life.
“These findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory,” Madden explained. “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. That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
More Than Just Games
Although it might be tempting to dismiss these artifacts as simple entertainment, Madden argues they likely served a much broader purpose.
Games of chance may have functioned as what researchers call “social technologies of integration,” helping disparate groups interact, exchange goods, and build relationships.
In a world where different bands or tribes might meet only occasionally, shared games could afford a structured, low-risk way to establish trust and cooperation. Gambling, in this sense, becomes more than a pastime. It becomes a means for social cohesion.
There is also evidence suggesting that dice may mark sites of periodic gatherings, where groups came together for trade, mating, and cultural interaction. The presence of dice in these contexts could serve as an archaeological “signature of aggregation” of such interactions.
Rewriting the History of Chance
Geographically, the study says the earliest identified prehistoric dice cluster is in a western corridor centered on the Rocky Mountains and western Great Plains, and that their distribution later broadens into surrounding western regions.
Notably, the study identified no prehistoric (pre–450 BP) dice in eastern North America before European contact. However, Madden stresses that this should not be taken as proof they were absent, since the dataset is incomplete and may reflect gaps or bias in the archaeological record or in the available published evidence.
He also suggests that the upheavals of the postcontact era, including colonization, dispossession, disease, and forced migration, may have helped drive the later spread of dice traditions into eastern North America.
Taken together, the findings contest a deeply ingrained narrative that the intellectual roots of probability and structured randomness are primarily a product of Old World civilizations.
Instead, the evidence suggests that Native American societies were early innovators in this space, developing and sustaining systems of chance long before similar practices were documented elsewhere.
The consequences of these findings touch on how we understand the evolution of human thought and how abstract concepts like randomness and probability emerge, not in isolation, but through everyday practices like play, competition, and social exchange.
In that sense, a set of dice may be more than a gaming tool. It may be one of humanity’s earliest instruments for grappling with uncertainty and a reminder that long before formal equations, people were already trying to make sense of chance.
“Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans,” Madden explained. “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.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com