Native Americans Used Dice and Games of Probability 12,000 Years Ago, Study Finds

The oldest known dice in the world didn't come from Mesopotamia or the Indus Valley. They came from the western Great Plains of North America, crafted from bone by Folsom-period hunter-gatherers more than 12,000 years ago.

A study published in American Antiquity reaches that conclusion after systematically re-examining artifacts across 57 to 58 archaeological sites in 12 states. The research pushes the known origins of dice and games of chance back roughly 6,000 years beyond the oldest confirmed examples from the Old World, which date to around 3,500 BC in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Bronze Age Caucasus.

The study's author is Robert J. Madden, a 62-year-old doctoral student at Colorado State University with an unlikely résumé. After studying archaeology as an undergraduate, Madden spent roughly 25 years as a trial lawyer and partner at the Houston firm Gibbs & Bruns, then left legal practice in 2017 and enrolled in a master's program in archaeology in 2022. "I did not dig up any new Native American dice," he said. "It just needed somebody to come along and pull it together."

Madden spent three years building a unified identification framework drawn from 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented by ethnographer Stewart Culin in his 1907 Bureau of American Ethnology monograph "Games of the North American Indians." Applying that attribute-based test to the published archaeological record, he identified 565 diagnostic and 94 probable dice across sites long catalogued as generic gaming pieces or overlooked entirely. "What was missing wasn't the evidence," Madden said. "It was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at."

The oldest examples come from Folsom-period sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, dating to between 12,845 and 12,255 years ago. The Lindenmeier site in northern Colorado alone yielded 15 specimens. A die from the Agate Basin site in Wyoming dates to approximately 10,000 years ago, and six specimens from Sudden Shelter and Cowboy Cave in Utah date to 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The objects are small, two-sided pieces of bone, flat or slightly rounded, tossed in groups onto a playing surface with one face designated as the counting side. Some retained faint traces of red pigment. Madden examined the oldest specimens in person at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Dice appeared across 22 distinct cultural complexes, ranging from mobile Folsom and Clovis hunting bands to sedentary Pueblo and Mandan agriculturalists. Madden argues the games functioned as a "social technology of integration," providing dispersed groups a rule-governed setting to exchange goods, share information, and form alliances. Historical accounts of Indigenous gambling show that in more than 80% of documented dice games, participants were exclusively women.

Robert Weiner, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College who has studied gambling and religion at Chaco Canyon, called the research "the most exciting paper I've seen in North American archaeology in at least the last five years."

Historians of mathematics regard dice games as humanity's earliest structured engagement with randomness, a conceptual precursor to probability theory and statistics. Madden was careful to frame what the evidence does and doesn't show. "These findings don't claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory," he said. "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.