Humans Have Been Gambling Since the Ice Age

Scientific American has reported on a new analysis that puts forward evidence that humans may have been gambling since the Ice Age, and the cultural phenomenon that gambling represents today may be woven into the fabric of human behavior for thousands of years.

Concept of Probability Goes Back 12,000 Years

While the scientific conclusions have been focused on a realization that humans have understood the nature of randomness for a long while and that some events are fully outside their control, the fact that humans have been gambling for thousands of years is particularly striking. 

The analysis published by archaeologist Robert J. Madden in American Antiquity suggests that gambling, such as chance-based games, dates back at least 12,000 years.

“This is the most exciting paper I’ve seen in North American archaeology in at least the last five years,” archeologist Robert Weiner, who works at Dartmouth College, told the publication. 

Madden was able to arrive at his conclusion by combing through at least 25 years of work by the archeologist community, with the scientist himself discovering specific dice with complicated etched marks on their sides, which persisted through the databases of photos taken from different excavation sites across North America and beyond. 

This suggested to Madden that gambling may have persisted, and specifically, been available to native North Americans long before any pilgrims from Europe arrived at its shores. 

Gambling as a Way to Cope with Events Outside of Humans’ Control

In other words, gambling has been a universal phenomenon that has emerged despite the geographical and cultural divide, thousands of years before humans found out about others’ existence. 

According to Madden, the adoption of gambling plays a deeper intellectual role in the development of cultures, as it essentially means societies have realized that not everything is the result of a predictable force, which means that these early civilizations had a working grasp of some form of probability. 

“When you start flipping a coin and writing down the outcomes, you are kind of summoning randomness. You can start to see these patterns emerging, and even more than seeing it, you can harness it,” Madden explained.