The history of gambling goes back way further than anyone imagined. This new discovery drastically alters the date of a key intellectual moment in the history of human culture—the recognition that some events in nature are random, under nobody’s control.
All games of chance, from Yahtzee to horse race betting, rely on probability, a relatively unintuitive concept. So archaeologists have taken care to document early examples, including dice used for games played by North Americans as early as 2,000 years ago. They’ve uncovered similar-seeming objects at even more ancient sites, but these pieces were individually too tiny and nondescript, and too isolated in the archaeological record, to identify with any certainty.
