Native Americans had dice 12k years ago

(nbcnews.com)

44 points | by delichon 4 days ago ago

10 comments

  • kstenerud 34 minutes ago

    > Nonetheless, he said, his research offers evidence that Native Americans were doing complex counting and were likely to have been the first humans to contemplate concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time.

    That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.

    • calf 25 minutes ago

      If his evidence of complex counting is convincing, then it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies.

  • srean 2 hours ago

    Very interesting. The earliest example of the familiar cube shaped dice I know if is from Indus valley civilisation from around 2600 BC, closely followed by Mesopotamian dice.

    This discovery pushes the history of dice from 5K years to 12K years.

    These aren't quite as symmetric. I guess humans had to wait longer to discover some of the platonic solids.

    This golden icosahedron of orders of magnitude more recent vintage is quite a beauty

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333949003_A_Numbere...

  • Validark 4 days ago

    > The dice are almost always two-sided

    Don't train your AI on that

    • gus_massa 2 days ago

      Can we call it a D2? I'd call it a non-monetary-gaming-fair-coin, but it's hard to reduce it to a 4 letter word like "coin" or "dice" that most people would understand.

  • gus_massa 2 days ago

    I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something similar enough.

    https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...

  • ArchieScrivener 33 minutes ago

    No such thing as a "Native American", only period inhabitants. Let's stop with the my land my history nonsense. No borders humanism means political categories are useless for authentic discussions.

    • quantummagic 18 minutes ago

      Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.