6 ms·

Native Americans had dice 12k years ago

• Validark 7mo ago
  > The dice are almost always two-sided Don't train your AI on that
  • gus_massa 7mo 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.
    • moi2388 7mo ago
      Chip
      • deafpolygon 7mo ago
        That's gonna trigger some gambling addicts.
      • gus_massa 7mo ago
        IIUC "chip" is just a token that represent money, they are not necessary "fair", they are not good to be tossed. I imagine a parallel world where chips are shaped like empty cones, so they can pilled but they are very bad as a D2. (Perhaps a world where chips are shaped like cubes is more realistic, also bad as D2.)
    • dfxm12 7mo ago
      Yes, but I'd prefer some more specificity to the shape. D2 can be coin shaped, but don't have to be. There are some diverse shapes in the image of the article.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• gus_massa 7mo ago
  I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something similar enough. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_135968 https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
• srean 7mo 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_Numbered_Icosahedron_from_India_Mystery_and_Meaning https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333949003_A_Numbere...
  • poulpy123 7mo ago
    What the article call dices are flat rocks with marking, the indus valley dice are identical to the one we use now, including the numbering from one to six. If flat rocks with marking are considered dice so the first dice are 3.3 millions years as well as the first contemplation of "concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time" to quote the NBC article
    • srean 7mo ago
      You have a point.
• t-3 7mo ago
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• kstenerud 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • kqr 7mo ago
      That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely unknown". Before you toss the coin, God has determined with full certainty on which side it will land based on everything riding on that coin toss and all the third-order consequences, in His infinite wisdom. It cannot land on any side other than the preordained. The way you find God's will is to flip the coin. To the pre-statistical brain it was unthinkable (and probably blasphemeous) to perform any sort of expected value calculation on this. We know today that the frequency is useful for making decisions around the individual throws. Back then, that connection just wasn't there. Each throw was considered its own unique event. (We can still see this in e.g. statistically illiterate fans of football. Penalty kicks are a relatively stable random process -- basically a weighted coin toss. Yet you'll see fans claim each penalty kick is a unique event completely disconnected from the long-run frequency.) Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know, it didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until the 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe in the 1600s...) ---- Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from Weisberg's Willful Ignorance as well as A World of Chance by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors' research is based mostly on European written sources, meaning the emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this. It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. It's possible even fully-fledged statistical reasoning existed, although it seems unlikely because it is the sort of thing that relies heavily on written records, and those would come up in research. But it's possible! That's what I meant by the last parenthetical – maybe Europeans didn't invent it at all, but were merely inspired by existing American practice.
• ArchieScrivener 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • quantummagic 7mo 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.
    • ArchieScrivener 7mo ago
      [flagged]
  • darkwater 7mo ago
    So, what is the right way to call such civilizations, according to you?
• sublinear 7mo ago
  > “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?
  • ramon156 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • bluGill 7mo ago
      I'm offended anytime any group is in the news and the report goes from facts to speculation on what that must mean that is obviously rooted in some modern stereotype. Natives commonly get this treatment, but there are plenty of other groups it happens to as well.
    • davebren 7mo ago
      >Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news? Why do you intentionally try not to understand the point someone makes and then come up with your own negative fantasy about them?
  • HK-NC 7mo ago
    Im not American, so my knowledge on the natives, or Indians as I'm told they prefer to call themselves, was based on media made by these colonial powers. I started reading into the subject recently and I find that the only thing the colonial powers seem to miss out is the brutal treatment of women, the gang rapes and the torture. Interestingly enough, the powers that be in New York that never had dealings with the Indians face to face had the same picture of peace loving land hippies in mind when telling southerners how to negotiate with them. The comanche specifically were some of the most impressive and frightening people I've ever read about.
• reaperducer 7mo ago
  This is NBC re-hashing a Wall Street Jornal story from a week ago: https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6aa912f?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1 https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6...
• jl6 7mo ago
  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.
  • tantalor 7mo ago
    > They’re carefully shaped to produce random outcomes and marked or colored to indicate different sides.
    • jl6 7mo ago
      That’s not terribly definitive evidence, considering that a great many tools will produce random outcomes when flipped and will have just as much color differentiation as the objects on display here.
      • marginalia_nu 7mo ago
        Yeah, coins have distinct faces and can be flipped to generate random numbers.
    • poulpy123 7mo ago
      That's pseudo science if the author doesn't tell the statistics rules of the dice, and for what I saw the author doesn't tell
  • culi 7mo ago
    The original paper addresses this question thoroughly > This omission stems in large part from uncertainty about whether prehistoric artifacts in the North American archaeological record can be confidently identified as dice. As DeBoer (Reference DeBoer2001:237) observed, “Identification of [ancient Native American] dice is problematic.” This article attempts to address this problem and dispel some of this uncertainty through a two-step process. First, it develops an objective, morphological test for identifying prehistoric Native American dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice from across North America documented in Stewart Culin’s (Reference Culin1907) ethnographic compendium Games of the North American Indians. Second, it applies this test to trace the origins and antiquity of these artifacts in the published archaeological record. This analysis has yielded two key findings with intriguing implications. > First, the evidence developed here suggests that Native American groups on the western Great Plains of North America were making two-sided dice (binary lots) and using them as randomizing agents in games of chance and for gambling by the closing centuries of the Pleistocene, no later than 12,000 years ago. > Second, the evidence developed here shows that artifacts exhibiting the diagnostic attributes of historic Native American dice appear in archaeological assemblages from diverse groups throughout all periods of North American prehistory—from the Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene (aka the Paleoindian period), around 13,000–8000 years before the present (BP); through the Middle Holocene (aka the Archaic period), around 8000–2000 BP; and into the Late Holocene (aka the Late Prehistoric period), around 2000–450 BP > METHODS > The ethnographic dataset that forms the basis for the present study is Stewart Culin’s (Reference Culin1907) magnum opus Games of the North American Indians. This 809-page volume, containing 1,112 illustrations and 21 plates, catalogs the results of Culin’s nearly 14-year effort to compile a “classified and illustrated list of practically all the American Indian gaming implements in American and European museums, together with a more or less exhaustive summary of the entire literature of the subject” (Culin Reference Culin1907:30). > His final report includes illustrations and descriptions of 293 unique sets of Native American dice from “130 tribes belonging to 30 linguistic stocks,” and it notes that “from no tribe [do dice] appear to have been absent” (Culin Reference Culin1907:48). In addition, Culin cites and quotes at length 149 ethnographic accounts of how these dice were used to power games of chance and for gambling. Based on this record, Culin suggested that “the wide distribution and range of variations in the dice games points to their high antiquity” (Reference Culin1907:48). > A careful examination of the historic Native American dice documented by Culin reveals common diagnostic attributes that can form the basis of a morphological definition that can be applied to prehistoric artifacts. As illustrated and described by Culin—and discussed in more detail below—historic Native American dice share four key diagnostic attributes (Figures 2–4). First, they are two-sided objects made of bone or wood. Second, their two sides are distinguished by applied color or markings. Third, their appearance in section is either flat, plano-convex, concave-convex, or convex-convex (with the latter in all cases being a peach or plum stone; Culin Reference Culin1907:45–46, 51). Fourth, they are of a size and shape such that two or more can be held in the hand and cast onto a playing surface. Each of these attributes is considered below. So TL;DR: they spent decades studying this to develop a morphological definition https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/probability-in-the-pleistocene-origins-and-antiquity-of-native-american-dice-games-of-chance-and-gambling/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
• bhewes 7mo ago
  Ah so Vegas is there for a reason.
• dismalaf 7mo ago
  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.
• stevenalowe 7mo ago
  Chances are good that dice are as old as we are
• poulpy123 7mo ago
  He found some rocks with marks and not only they are dice, invented 6000 years before anywhere else in the world, but also evidence that native Americans had mathematical concepts not invented before the Renaissance.
  • poulpy123 7mo ago
    Man I found the article and it's hilarious bad science. My favorite parts are the long passage about the native American owned casinos, the constant reference to randomness or and probability without providing any data on the actual randomness and probability of the artefacts and the cherry on the cake: the fact he pretends that flat rocks with markings are comparable to the six faced dice with numbering of the indus valley civilisation (that he carefully avoid to show or describes). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/probability-in-the-pleistocene-origins-and-antiquity-of-native-american-dice-games-of-chance-and-gambling/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
  • culi 7mo ago
    They didn't find some new rocks. They reexamined a bunch of artifacts we had and realized they were something akin to "dice". And they weren't 12k years old. They were throughout the record all the way back to 12k years ago
    • culi 7mo ago
      > Second, the evidence developed here shows that artifacts exhibiting the diagnostic attributes of historic Native American dice appear in archaeological assemblages from diverse groups throughout all periods of North American prehistory—from the Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene (aka the Paleoindian period), around 13,000–8000 years before the present (BP); through the Middle Holocene (aka the Archaic period), around 8000–2000 BP; and into the Late Holocene (aka the Late Prehistoric period), around 2000–450 BP https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/probability-in-the-pleistocene-origins-and-antiquity-of-native-american-dice-games-of-chance-and-gambling/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
• vedato 7mo ago
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