Humans have always been playful. But for much of our history, play has left little trace. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely preserve and the fleeting pleasures they produce are even harder to recover.
The recent discovery of 12,000-year-old dice, published in American Antiquity, however, sheds new light on the playfulness of human societies in the deep past.
Archaeologist Richard J. Madden identified 565 dice from sites across North America including Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. They dated from the 19th century all the way back to 12,000 years ago. The recognition of these artefacts as dice pushes back the material evidence for human play by thousands of years, which Madden interprets as evidence of games of chance and gambling. He believes that his study shows that Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else.
