Research published in the American Antiquity magazine has officially confirmed the existence of the world's oldest dice sets. This discovery proves that humans participated in gambling games very early, thousands of years earlier than what scientists once imagined. These "unique" dice pieces are completely different from the traditional six-sided shapes we often see today.
They are called "binary cards", have a flat, two-sided shape and are meticulously crafted by hand from bones or wood. Their operating method is quite simple but stimulating: Players will drop these cards into the air to determine winning or losing based on flip faces, a primitive form similar to fortune-telling or coin-throwing popular in modern life.
Archaeologists have identified more than 600 binary dice at 45 different sites stretching across the US states of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.
The most shocking thing in academia is their age, ranging from 12,800 to 12,200 years ago. This number shows that Native Americans knew how to "kill" with dice 6,000 years earlier than the oldest dice troops ever found in Mesopotamian civilizations or the Indus Valley during the Bronze Age.
Mr. Robert J. Madden, a leading research expert at the University of Colorado, said that these artifacts have long been in the sights of scientists but are often commonly called "game objects" with unclear functions.
By establishing new analytical criteria based on traditional customs, he affirmed that these are the earliest gambling tools of mankind. Even the rules of these 12,000-year-old dice games still have such strong vitality that ancient-style gameplay tutorial videos are still widely shared on modern social networks.
This discovery not only opens up a new perspective on the development of probability mathematics but also the "human culture" of prehistoric human images. It proves that from the harsh Ice Age, our ancestors had a need for social interaction and entertainment through chance games.
