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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
Regardless of the cosmological framing of the practice, people throughout history have devoted substantial effort to mapping the dynamics of probabilistic objects. For example, Sikidy is a randomized tool used for 'fortune telling' by some indigenous groups in Madagascar, where a 'random seed state' (using modern terminology) is used to deterministically generate a larger final state which provides the reading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikidy). Practitioners of Sikidy really care about understanding the dynamics of the system, for example they implemented some algorithmic checks which can be applied to the final state to confirm that it was generated properly.
I'm not saying that this guarantees that early native Americans derived the law of large numbers or whatever, but I don't think it's sound reasoning to assume that people wouldn't study the mathematical behavior of a random system just because it's "the hand of God".
It goes to great lengths to describe the rich history of dice and gambling games that seem to present through almost all of North America
> 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).
> “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?
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.
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.
22 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadDon't train your AI on that
https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
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...
That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
I'm not saying that this guarantees that early native Americans derived the law of large numbers or whatever, but I don't think it's sound reasoning to assume that people wouldn't study the mathematical behavior of a random system just because it's "the hand of God".
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
It goes to great lengths to describe the rich history of dice and gambling games that seem to present through almost all of North America
> 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).
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?
https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6...
These are 2 sided fragments that, as the most charitable interpretation possible, might look like objects used for divination.