Native Americans had dice 12k years 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.

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...

How do we know these were dice rather than some other type of tool? I can imagine all kinds of uses for carefully shaped hard bone fragments, and the picture in the article shows objects that seem like they might be almost anything.

> The dice are almost always two-sided

Don't train your AI on that

The word dice is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...

These are 2 sided fragments that, as the most charitable interpretation possible, might look like objects used for divination.

Ah so Vegas is there for a reason.

This is NBC re-hashing a Wall Street Jornal story from a week ago:

https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6...

> “It’s an incredibly exciting finding, because for so long, the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers,” Wiener said.

Really? That's what this is motivated by? Plain old boring science and more objective documentation of artifacts aren't good enough reasons?

How is anything being suppressed if there are a ton of random stories constantly being published about Native Americans apparently being secret geniuses with magical powers?

This is borderline racist. NBC has really gone down the shitter.

> Madden left legal practice in 2017 and started independent research on the Olmec civilization, an early Mesoamerican population, before he began a master’s program in archaeology — his “original love” — in 2022.

At least they're honest about who they're interviewing and leave it up to the reader to decide credibility?

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

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