Ice Age dice show early Native Americans may have understood probability
Madden was able to conclusively identify 565 Native American dice from 45 different sites and designate an additional 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Objects with a drilled or pierced hole were excluded from his evaluation because they might as well have been beads or other decorative objects rather than dice. He also excluded objects whose two sides could only be distinguished by their shape, without clear markings, for similar reasons. The oldest artifacts, from the Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, date to the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago.
According to Madden, dice and games of chance in these societies had nothing to do with contemporary games of chance, where the house always has the advantage; rather, they probably fulfilled a social function.
“These games are head-to-head; “There’s no house,” Madden said. “It’s a fair game, everyone has equal opportunities, equal conditions, and it was used as a form of exchange, especially between groups of people who weren’t often in contact with each other, so they didn’t really know each other. It’s actually a form of giving over time that creates lasting reciprocal relationships. This is not a business transaction where you and I are going to exchange something and then go our separate ways.
The findings also shed light on early Native American concepts of probability. “When we see the origins of dice, we literally see the origins of probabilistic thinking,” Madden said. “It has always been thought to have started in the Old World, in the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This research shows that Native Americans were making dice, generating random outcomes, and using these random streams of probabilities and exploiting them in games of chance 6,000 years earlier. So if we want to understand the history of probabilistic thinking, we now need to look at the Old World at the end of the last ice age.
That said, “these results do not claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers practiced a formal theory of probability,” Madden added. “But they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in a reproducible, rules-based way that exploited probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. This is important for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.”
American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOIs).
