Ancient Native American Dice Predate Any Previously Known Examples By Over 6,000 Years

12,000-Year-Old Bone Dice Suggest Native Americans Were Gambling Long Before Anyone Else

Long before casino floors lit up the Las Vegas Strip, people on the western Great Plains were rolling dice. According to new research, they were doing it at least 12,000 years ago, placing them among the earliest known gamblers on record, predating other documented examples by thousands of years.

A study published in the journal American Antiquity has traced Native American dice, games of chance, and gambling to the final centuries of the last Ice Age. Bone artifacts matching the shape and markings of known Native American dice were recovered from sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico associated with a prehistoric hunting culture called Folsom, and they predate the oldest currently known dice from the ancient Near East, the Indus Valley, and the Caucasus by more than 6,000 years. Those Old World examples date to around 3500 BC. These American artifacts are several thousand years older.

That gap matters beyond the bragging rights. Historians of mathematics have long pointed to dice as a key early step in humanity’s developing grasp of randomness and probability, ideas that underpin everything from modern statistics to insurance pricing. Ancient Native Americans may have been engaging with games of chance earlier than any other documented culture.

How Researchers Identified Prehistoric Native American Dice

Proving that ancient bone fragments are dice rather than tools or ornaments is harder than it sounds. Anthropologist Robert Madden of Colorado State University tackled the problem by turning to a landmark 1907 compendium, Games of the North American Indians, compiled by ethnographer Stewart Culin over nearly 14 years. That 809-page volume documented 293 sets of historic Native American dice from 130 tribal groups, noting that “from no tribe [do dice] appear to have been absent.”

From Culin’s records, Madden derived a four-part identification test: the object must be two-sided and non-perforated; made of wood or bone; have its two sides distinguished by markings or color; and be small enough for two or more to be held in the hand and tossed. He then spent three years searching published archaeological site reports across North America for artifacts that fit the criteria.

Across 57 sites in 12 states, he found 659 such artifacts. Most are made of bone and bear incised markings that clearly distinguish one face from the other. Together they span more than 12,000 years of North American prehistory.

Native American Dice Appear in Every Era of Prehistoric North America

Perhaps the most telling feature of the record is its continuity. Native American dice turn up in every major prehistoric period across western North America, and at several sites they appear in multiple soil layers separated by thousands of years. At Cowboy Cave in Utah, six dice were found in two distinct strata spanning more than 6,000 years of repeated occupation. At the Agate Basin site in Wyoming, dice appear in both 12,000-year-old Folsom deposits and in layers about 2,000 years younger.

Dice also turned up across 22 distinct cultural groups, from nomadic Ice Age hunters to semi-settled farmers to full-scale agricultural societies. No single ethnic group or way of life owns this tradition. It crossed cultural lines for millennia.

Why Native American Gambling Survived 12,000 Years

Why would dice games prove so durable? Madden points to research suggesting that gambling served a genuinely useful social function. Some scholars studying prehistoric Native American gambling have argued that it functioned as a “mechanism for transcending social distance,” giving otherwise unrelated groups a structured way to meet, trade goods, share information, and build alliances. In a world where exchange normally depended on preexisting personal relationships, gambling gave strangers a neutral context for interaction.

Fair odds were at the heart of it. For two groups with no shared history to sit down and wager, both sides needed confidence the game was square. That likely depended on a shared sense of fairness and repeated experience with chance. As 16th-century mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, an early pioneer of probability theory and a gambler himself, once observed: “the most fundamental principle of all in gambling is simply equal conditions.”

That ancient tradition has not disappeared. More than 250 tribal nations now operate over 500 gaming locations across the United States, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission. Researcher Jessica Cattelino has documented that tribal gaming has become a direct expression of Native sovereignty, enacted through the governmental functions that gaming operations make possible. A practice with 12,000-year-old roots now drives a major political and economic force in modern Native American life.

One unresolved wrinkle: all 57 sites with prehistoric dice are in the western half of North America, with none east of the Mississippi River, even though eastern tribes were documented playing dice games after European contact. Madden suggests gambling may have been a western tradition that spread east during colonization, carried by forced migration and displacement. It is a reasonable theory, and an open question.

Twelve thousand years of dice, from bone carvings on an Ice Age plain to billion-dollar casinos, is a long run for any human tradition. Researchers suggest that longevity was earned. Gambling may have functioned as a social tool for bringing otherwise disconnected people together, a use that, judging by the archaeological record, proved remarkably hard to give up.

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