A study by an anthropologist and PhD student at Colorado State University has identified the first evidence of human gambling in 12,000-year-old Native American dice. The findings were published in the journal American Antiquity. The study author, Robert Madden, found that the dice, which predates the concept of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years, were used as multi-sided randomness generators and used in games of chance as early as the last Ice Age. To confirm these artifacts’ function, Madden inspected over 600 sets of Native American Dice from various prehistoric archaeological sites across the Western U.S. He identified 565 examples of “diagnostic” dice, 94 “probable” ones that fit only two criteria. These dice reportedly spanned 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and the Rockies, with the oldest examples dating back to the Folsom culture.