Native Americans had dice 12k years ago
nbcnews.com43 points by delichon 4 days ago
43 points by delichon 4 days 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.
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.
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...
> The dice are almost always two-sided
Don't train your AI on that
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.
I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something similar enough.
https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
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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.