Ancient cultures across the globe have been playing games of chance — using dice — far, far longer than historians had ever realized, a new study finds. Researchers turned up these gaming pieces from as far back as 12,000 years ago. That makes them the oldest known dice.
These came from western North America. Until their discovery, the oldest known dice were from Mesopotamia, an ancient region in what is now Iraq. The oldest of those were only about 5,500 years old.
Many Native American cultures have a rich history of dice games and still play them today.
Such games could have helped foster social connection, says archaeologist Robert Weiner, who was not part of the new study. If you meet strangers, “how are you going to interact?” he asks. Dice games could have offered one way for strangers to bond. Weiner works at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.
But until now, the roots of early American dice games had been fuzzy. Robert Madden hoped to track down those...
English (US)