Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling

Abstract This article investigates the prehistory of Native American dice, games of chance, and gambling and for the first time traces these artifacts and cultural practices to their earliest appearances. Uncertainty about whether prehistoric North American artifacts can be confidently identified as dice without objective criteria has meant that no prior attempt to accomplish this task has been undertaken. This uncertainty is addressed here by (1) deriving a morphological test for identifying prehistoric dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented in Stewart Culin’s 1907 compendium Games of the North American Indians and (2) using this test to search the published North American archaeological record for matching artifacts. The results suggest that dice, games of chance, and gambling have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for the last 12,000 years, with the earliest dice appearing in Late Pleistocene Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Remarkably, these Pleistocene dice predate their earliest known Old World counterparts by millennia. These results suggest that ancient Native Americans possessed a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability and consequently were early movers in humanity’s emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts.