Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else, study says

Archaeological record suggests hunter gatherers were playing games of chance at the end of the last ice age

Native American hunter gatherers were using dice for gaming and gambling more than 6,000 years before the practice appeared anywhere else, a new study argues.

It says dice were being made and used on the western great plains of North America at the end of the last ice age, more than 12,000 years ago.

It had been thought that the earliest examples of dice were in the bronze age societies of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley.

Robert Madden, author of the study, said: “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as old world innovations. 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 recognised.”