Fantasy Enjoyer

This is SO cool—archaeologists have proposed, based on a study of historical dice from multiple different Native American communities and traditions, that these wood and bone artifacts from 12,000 years ago are also dice. It’s a fascinating article and makes a very reasonable case. Which means that, in North America, dice pre-date the previously-known earliest Mesopotamian/Indian dice by 6,000 years! And have been in pretty continuous use since then.

As the scholarly article linked in this writeup says:

 This finding is all the more significant because historians of mathematics frequently identify the invention of dice and games of chance as a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe [...] This is so because dice throws produce “characteristic random or patternless sequences of outcomes” to which “the calculus of probability applies straightforwardly” (Franklin 2016:1). Consequently, the making and using of dice represent humans’ first known efforts to intentionally generate, observe, and record streams of controlled, random events (David 1962:ix) and harness the probabilistic regularities that appear in them (such as the so-called law of large numbers) to power games of chance.