A new study by Robert Madden, a graduate student at Colorado State University, has revealed that Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for over 12,000 years. The oldest examples of Native American dice predate the earliest known dice in the Old World by millennia. These ancient objects were found to be common among nearly all Native American tribes. The study suggests that ancient groups deliberately made objects designed to produce random outcomes, which were used in structured games thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.