Are These the Earliest Known Dice in the World? Native Americans May Have Used Them to Play Games of Chance More Than 12,000 Years Ago

A new study suggests that humans were playing with probability during the Ice Age—and that dice were invented 6,000 years earlier than previously thought

Michele Debczak | Correspondent

April 3, 2026

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Cultures around the world have been playing games of chance for millennia. Previously, historians had discovered examples of dice dating back some 5,500 years.

But new research may push back that timeline dramatically. According to a study published this week in the journal American Antiquity, the oldest known dice were made by Native Americans more than 12,000 years ago.

Early dice tended to be simpler than the six-sided cubes we use today. They were often two-sided pieces of bone or wood, with one marked side and one unmarked side. The simplicity of these objects can make them tricky to identify. To prepare for his research, Colorado State University archaeologist Robert Madden studied anthropologist Stewart Culin’s 1907 book, Games of the North American Indians, which included descriptions of 293 sets of Native American dice. He then sifted through archaeological archives for artifacts with the features that Culin had described.

In his analysis, Madden identified more than 600 dice found in the United States between 13,000 and 450 years ago. Native Americans were playing with probability during the Ice Age, 6,000 years before dice appeared in places like Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, according to Aylin Woodward of the Wall Street Journal.

“This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness,” Madden tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. “We’re seeing really complex practices and an intellectual accomplishment here.”

The three oldest dice reported in the study were used by hunter-gatherers in modern-day Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. All of the artifacts, which included 565 “diagnostic” dice and 94 “probable” examples, came from 57 archaeological sites in the western United States.

Madden tells Live Science that the dice were more common in “liminal spaces,” and that the activity may have been a way for different groups to bridge social gaps. Citing previous research by archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki and anthropologist Warren DeBoer, he writes in the study that “gambling in ancient North America was an outward-directed, intergroup activity reserved for outsiders that took place on territorial frontiers and at large intertribal gatherings, making gambling an important mechanism for cultural transmission and knowledge exchange.”

The study also raises new questions. According to DeBoer’s research, out of 131 historical accounts of Native American dice games, 81 percent were played by women exclusively. “Additional research could shed light on whether this historical pattern extends into the prehistoric past, suggesting the possibility that women may have been leaders in the social and intellectual innovations associated with ancient Native American dice, games of chance and gambling,” Madden writes.

For now, the intricacies of these games and the purposes they served remain unclear. Still, the new study offers fresh insights into dice games involving probability, which humans have been playing for much longer than scholars previously thought.

“This is the most exciting paper I’ve seen in North American archaeology in at least the last five years,” Robert Weiner, an archaeologist at Dartmouth College who wasn’t involved in the research, tells Scientific American’s Joseph Howlett. “Demonstrating this Native American contribution to global intellectual history is fantastic.”

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Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.