[HN Gopher] Native Americans had dice 12k years ago
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       Native Americans had dice 12k years ago
        
       Author : delichon
       Score  : 129 points
       Date   : 2026-04-04 00:59 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nbcnews.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nbcnews.com)
        
       | Validark wrote:
       | > The dice are almost always two-sided
       | 
       | Don't train your AI on that
        
         | gus_massa wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | moi2388 wrote:
           | Chip
        
             | deafpolygon wrote:
             | That's gonna trigger some gambling addicts.
        
             | gus_massa wrote:
             | IIUC "chip" is just a token that represent money, they are
             | not necessary "fair", they are not good to be tossed.
             | 
             | I imagine a parallel world where chips are shaped like
             | empty cones, so they can pilled but they are very bad as a
             | D2. (Perhaps a world where chips are shaped like cubes is
             | more realistic, also bad as D2.)
        
           | dfxm12 wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something
       | similar enough.
       | 
       | https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
        
       | srean wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | kstenerud wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | calf wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | kqr wrote:
           | That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known
           | for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around
           | half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any
           | individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely
           | unknown".
           | 
           | Before you toss the coin, God has determined with full
           | certainty on which side it will land based on everything
           | riding on that coin toss and all the third-order
           | consequences, in His infinite wisdom. It cannot land on any
           | side other than the preordained. The way you find God's will
           | is to flip the coin.
           | 
           | To the pre-statistical brain it was unthinkable (and probably
           | blasphemeous) to perform any sort of expected value
           | calculation on this.
           | 
           | We know today that the frequency is useful for making
           | decisions around the individual throws. Back then, that
           | connection just wasn't there. Each throw was considered its
           | own unique event.
           | 
           | (We can still see this in e.g. statistically illiterate fans
           | of football. Penalty kicks are a relatively stable random
           | process -- basically a weighted coin toss. Yet you'll see
           | fans claim each penalty kick is a unique event completely
           | disconnected from the long-run frequency.)
           | 
           | Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know, it
           | didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until the
           | 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than
           | that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe
           | in the 1600s...)
           | 
           | ----
           | 
           | Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from
           | Weisberg's _Willful Ignorance_ as well as _A World of Chance_
           | by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors ' research is
           | based mostly on European written sources, meaning the
           | emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this.
           | 
           | It's possible different conceptualisations of probability
           | existed elsewhere. It's possible even fully-fledged
           | statistical reasoning existed, although it seems unlikely
           | because it is the sort of thing that relies heavily on
           | written records, and those would come up in research. But
           | it's possible! That's what I meant by the last parenthetical
           | - maybe Europeans didn't invent it at all, but were merely
           | inspired by existing American practice.
        
             | mkl wrote:
             | That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.
        
               | kqr wrote:
               | Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness
               | to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
        
               | peyton wrote:
               | From TFA:
               | 
               | > No prehistoric dice have ever been discovered in the
               | eastern part of North America.
               | 
               | Come on, you don't really think modern statistics
               | might've come about from Europeans taking inspiration in
               | the gambling practices of nomadic peoples in remote
               | southwestern parts of North America. No need to pay lip
               | service to every scold.
        
               | Pay08 wrote:
               | I don't, when the much more likely answer is that it came
               | from the more than a millenia old gambling practices of
               | Europe.
        
               | vintermann wrote:
               | Fatalism is widespread, but not nearly universal enough
               | that we can say it was the norm 15000 years ago.
               | 
               | For that matter, people who _were_ pretty fatalist were
               | still capable of using chance for purposes of fairness.
               | The democrats in ancient Athens come to mind. I 'm also
               | pretty sure the (Christian) apostles' use of chance was
               | also more about avoiding a human making the decision,
               | than about divination.
        
               | kstenerud wrote:
               | Are you quite sure of that? Historians would beg to
               | differ.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche
        
               | vintermann wrote:
               | I'm not saying divination isn't a thing, I'm saying there
               | are examples of use of chance where it doesn't seem like
               | divination.
               | 
               | Athenians selected through sortition didn't seem to act
               | much like they believed they were chosen by the gods, and
               | they defended their institutions mainly as wisdom, not as
               | revelation.
               | 
               | And the apostles, being Jews, had a big taboo about using
               | chance to determine God's will, but apparently not
               | against using chance to fill vacancies.
        
               | kstenerud wrote:
               | That's actually the opposite of the historical evidence.
               | 
               | https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2
               | 010...
               | 
               | https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%201
               | 6%3...
               | 
               | https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%20
               | 16%...
        
               | vintermann wrote:
               | There are bible passages suggesting the outcome of lots
               | is God's will, and there are passages condemning
               | divination. You can find them from the same links you
               | posted above. But at the time of the apostles, it was a
               | no-no to use chance to figure out God's will.
               | 
               | Please don't just shake links out of your sleeve, and
               | talk to me instead. Do _you_ think the Athenians acted
               | like they were chosen by the gods when their number came
               | up?
               | 
               | Don't _you_ see a difference between the situations where
               | chance could clearly have been used simply as a mechanism
               | for fairness  / avoiding a biased choice, and things like
               | reading the movement of the birds or interpreting the
               | shape of molten lead thrown into water?
               | 
               | Even in things like the goat choice in the bible you link
               | above, I think it may be more about fairness than
               | divination. Because as far as I know, the priests
               | actually got to eat the sacrificial goat, but not the
               | scapegoat they chased into the wild. So was it _really_
               | about divining which goat God hated more, or was it maybe
               | about  "don't cheat by keeping the juicy goat for
               | yourselves and chasing away the mangy one!"?
        
               | odyssey7 wrote:
               | Yes, but so too is a modern western framing of these
               | "dice" as "gambling" objects.
               | 
               | And also, the esteem in recognizing them as prefiguring a
               | skill or system of thought that fund managers and FDA
               | panels use today. In a roundabout way, it praises our own
               | society's systems by recognizing an ancient civilization
               | for potentially having discovered some of their
               | mathematical preliminaries.
        
               | DaedalusII wrote:
               | yeah man these boys were definitely doing bayesian
               | probability and gaussian distributions to operate their
               | sea shell based barter economy
        
             | netcan wrote:
             | Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has
             | the option of getting very abstract.
             | 
             | It's pretty common, for example, to believe that God is on
             | our side and we will win the war or somesuch. Actually
             | walking onto a battlefield with a literal expectation of
             | divine intervention... much less as common. Pious generals
             | still believe in tactics, steel and suchlike. Not always...
             | but usually.
             | 
             | European pre-modern writers were mostly very pious. The
             | works preserved are likewise very pious. Greek philosophers
             | were often closer to atheists than later Christians.
        
             | calf wrote:
             | That has barely to do with my specific point. The
             | researcher in TFA said _if_ they were doing complex
             | counting _then_ blah blah blah.
             | 
             | The general insight is that complex counting would force
             | some kind of Bayesian or probabilistic reasoning even one
             | that is informal, intuitive, rudimentary or partly
             | incorrect. Whereas a theory of divining stones usage would
             | have very little actual complex counting involved, maybe
             | they had the tribal equivalent of fortune slips, and so
             | they would not be cognitively challenged to reason about
             | dice. What constitutes complex counting, I don't know, ask
             | the researcher. But IMO it's not out realm of impossibility
             | and time and again we have discovered the old ones of Homo
             | sapiens were more cognitively/intellectually sophisticated
             | than these kinds of scientists assumed earlier. I'm not
             | wedded to this, it would be hard to prove, especially as a
             | hypothesis involving human cognitive constraints/evolution,
             | but I won't dismiss it as completely implausible either. It
             | is an interesting if-then "archaeological cognitive
             | science" argument, that's all.
        
             | tech_ken wrote:
             | > Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know,
             | it didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until
             | the 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier
             | than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in
             | Europe in the 1600s...)
             | 
             | > It's possible different conceptualisations of probability
             | existed elsewhere.
             | 
             | Rudimentary sampling theory 100% predates 17th century
             | Europe: https://ckraju.net/wordpress_F/?p=55
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _it 's not implausible to me that they soon also had some
           | rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies_
           | 
           | We can actually tell from their dice that they don't.
           | 
           | I believe in the book _Against the Gods_ the author described
           | ancient dice being--mostly--uneven. (One exception, I
           | believe, was ancient Egypt.) The thinking was a weird-looking
           | dice looks the most intuitively random. It wasn't until
           | later, when the average gambler started statistically
           | reasoning, that standardized dice became common.
           | 
           | These dice are highly non-standard. In their own way, their
           | similarity to other cultures of antiquities' senses of
           | randomness is kind of beautiful.
        
             | kqr wrote:
             | It's not entirely crazy. I believe Thorp described this
             | about roulette wheels. If they had no imperfection at all,
             | it would be computationally laborious but not unthinkable
             | to compute the result from the initial positions and
             | velocities. In order to be unpredictable, roulette wheels
             | _need_ to have imperfections. Those very same
             | imperfections, of course, lead to some statistical
             | regularities.
             | 
             | Edit: It wasn't quite that, but very nearly: start reading
             | paragraph 5 in http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-
             | content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
             | 
             | In the next article in the series, he explains that in
             | practice, roulette wheels are often tilted and that can be
             | used to gain a further advantage:
             | http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-
             | content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
        
               | blitzar wrote:
               | If you are the house you probably want to go around every
               | so often and give the wheel a little bump to reset the
               | entropy seed for the day.
        
               | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
               | Anecdotally I was on a streak and the dealer was actively
               | concentrating and focusing to get my number again. She
               | managed to get it 4 out of 5 spins. Now she would
               | obviously never admit to this, but I'm positive that she
               | was able to, on this specific wheel, land on the number
               | she wanted.
               | 
               | I think we would've kept going but she rotated off and I
               | cashed out.
               | 
               | Edit: Thorp and Shannon! What a duo. Great articles,
               | thanks for sharing.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | The house wants you to think that anyway. If it is
               | possible or not..
               | 
               | The house wants people to win money and tell their
               | friends, and every "winning" strategy is good for them -
               | so long as in the end the house makes money.
        
               | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
               | I mean, yes, but also no. The house wants you to lose
               | money, but win just enough to think you have a chance.
               | There's a reason those zeroes are on the board.
               | 
               | There's no deep strategy in Roulette, really. I play for
               | fun, and the money I put on the table is already spent.
               | 
               | The anecdote was: I wouldn't have seriously believed that
               | you could reliably manipulate the spin outcome, and as an
               | observer, that's true. I didn't believe the dealer could
               | either, but after seeing this dealer pull it off I
               | definitely see the potential for manipulation. It was
               | almost like she was showing off that _she could_. And
               | besides, she earned a hefty tip.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | > The house wants you to lose money, but win just enough
               | to think you have a chance
               | 
               | The house wants to make money overall. They know that
               | individuals who make money tend to tell more friends than
               | those who lose money - free advertising - so they want
               | some people to make money. The total needs to be the
               | average person loses money, but they need some
               | individuals to make money.
               | 
               | On the small stakes systems they may even like it when
               | they lose money like that - the dealer makes a big tip,
               | and it encourages people (or their friends) to move to a
               | higher stakes bet where they will lose more. They have to
               | be careful about the law (which probably doesn't allow
               | that manipulation if possible, even if it isn't in their
               | favor), but again individuals with a story to tell are
               | worth a lot more than than the money they lose on that
               | story.
        
             | JuniperMesos wrote:
             | Maybe this is because dice were originally made from the
             | bones of animals like sheep, which are inherently
             | irregular.
        
               | Pay08 wrote:
               | I was going to ask how we know if the dice are
               | intentionally uneven, as opposed to it being a result of
               | technological, cost, or time constraints.
        
             | calf wrote:
             | I don't see the point of being confident about this in
             | either direction. I will not assert for certain but (or,
             | IF) they had dice for 12000 years (12,000!) and to be so
             | certain they didn't know anything at all on an intuitive
             | level is a bit strong a position to take, I don't see that
             | as a safe null/default hypothesis.
             | 
             | I had also said "..., THEN it's not implausible" so I don't
             | love how you quoted a strawman in the first place.
        
           | sorokod wrote:
           | ...and, is it?
           | 
           | https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-
           | antiquity/a...
        
             | calf wrote:
             | It doesn't matter. The first point raised was
             | essentially"well the dice were just part of a belief system
             | about divinity so they could not have been more
             | sophisticated than that" and then I said that the article's
             | logical reasoning is actually more interesting than that
             | kind of kneejerk dismissal. Just that one line of thought
             | mentioned in the article is intrinsically interesting,
             | because it posits a kind of forcing argument, that if there
             | is evidence for complexity behavior then there is evidence
             | for complex thought required of it. That is an interesting
             | cognitive science kind of argument, different than a flat
             | argument of the type "oh their belief system would have
             | prevented them from developing it".
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | People used to play board games to gamble/predict, for sure;
         | but they also liked a moneyless/careless play.
        
         | cassepipe wrote:
         | > the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures
         | have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by
         | colonial powers
         | 
         | Or maybe intellectual refers to someone a position in a society
         | that sufficiently is well-off to be able to support some guy
         | not having to provide work for collective survival and who can
         | spend time trying to formalize abstract thinking for which
         | _writing_ would help with (which north americans natives did
         | not have)
         | 
         | It's ok, it can be an interesting culture worthy of being
         | studied, and of course they weren't dummies, without trying to
         | pretend that north american natives were "contemplating
         | concepts like the law of large numbers" without writing device
         | or support nor some kind of alphabet, come on
         | 
         | Yes colonization is awful and yes the natives were genocided
         | but that doesn't mean that everyone was on its way too landing
         | on the moon had they not been suppressed both physically and
         | culturally. The path to civilization only gets narrower and the
         | people who get to contribute meaningfully fewer and fewer.
        
           | superbyte wrote:
           | don't worry, professional researchers studying this stuff for
           | real, a helpful hn commenter is on the way!
        
             | wredcoll wrote:
             | Nobody is perfect, even "professionals" and I think there's
             | a reasonable difference between "I, a novice, am skeptical
             | of your conclusions" and "I, a novice, have come up with an
             | entirely new theory".
        
             | cassepipe wrote:
             | This, unironically
             | 
             | I think you are being downvoted because people thought you
             | were being ironic but I am not sure you were.
        
           | AlotOfReading wrote:
           | Writing might be helpful for intellectuals, but it's
           | certainly not _necessary_. Socrates has a whole argument
           | about written argumentation being a sign of a weak mind.
           | 
           | Moreover, we _have_ records from some of these precolonial
           | intellectual traditions in the Americas. The nahua genre of
           | _huehuetlatolli_ is an excellent example in many ways. The
           | selectively preserved bits we have resemble something closer
           | to Confucianism than mathematics, but keep in mind we have a
           | narrow selection from a single genre in a much wider
           | landscape.
           | 
           | In what's now US territory, proto-writing systems (emoji are
           | a modern example of these) existed. There were also
           | intellectual traditions associated with them, particularly
           | among southwestern groups like the Puebloans. Those are
           | relatively closed to academics for a variety of historical
           | reasons and consequently understudied, but we know they
           | existed.
        
             | cassepipe wrote:
             | So first Socrates had _opinions_ but is certainty not an
             | authority on the development of humanity through time. Also
             | ironically we know what he supposedly said and are still
             | talking about it because his words have been written down.
             | 
             | They have been written down because there was in Athenian
             | society enough surplus/inequality for those guys to hang
             | out and talk and be influencers (while their wives and
             | slaves were doing all the hard work) and produce some kind
             | of paper/parchment.
             | 
             | Just like the Aztec _empire_ (from whom we have the
             | huehuetlatolli) who also had production surplus thus social
             | classes thus the leisure of an intellectual life.
             | 
             | Both have benefited from 10000 years of settled human
             | history painstakingly modifying the landscape to create
             | that surplus and yet they still didn't have algebra so
             | there's no shot this collection of tribes 12000 were
             | conceptualizing the law of large numbers or whatnot.
             | 
             | Maybe I overreacted but I feel like this kind of blurb in
             | article sounds good but is is completely misleading in that
             | it crushes developmental history into a simple narrative to
             | pander to a crowd of people lacking curiosity when it goes
             | beyond knowing that colonialism is bad
             | 
             | So sorry I may have been talking past you to my make point
             | but thank for your substantiated comment, that was
             | interesting information
        
         | tech_ken wrote:
         | 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".
        
       | sublinear wrote:
       | > "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?
        
         | HK-NC wrote:
         | Im not American, so my knowledge on the natives, or Indians as
         | I'm told they prefer to call themselves, was based on media
         | made by these colonial powers. I started reading into the
         | subject recently and I find that the only thing the colonial
         | powers seem to miss out is the brutal treatment of women, the
         | gang rapes and the torture. Interestingly enough, the powers
         | that be in New York that never had dealings with the Indians
         | face to face had the same picture of peace loving land hippies
         | in mind when telling southerners how to negotiate with them.
         | The comanche specifically were some of the most impressive and
         | frightening people I've ever read about.
        
           | bluGill wrote:
           | The first problem with what you know: there were many
           | different tribes and they didn't share common culture. They
           | did have some trade, but there was no unified culture.
           | 
           | Second problem: diseases (smallpox is the best known) spread
           | much faster than the Europeans and so most of what we they
           | could see was influenced by large numbers of dead people in
           | the previous generation that wasn't recovered from. It is a
           | lot easier to be peaceful with your neighbors when there are
           | no population pressures (that is everyone can eat enough on
           | the land you have). Likewise it is easier to give away
           | "stuff" when you have a lot of extras from older generations
           | that nobody needs.
           | 
           | Third, guns and horses allowed for ways to life that were not
           | possible before. The great nomadic horse tribes - that was
           | clearly observed, but the way of life depends on things the
           | Europeans brought not long before. It is really hard to know
           | what the culture was like before the horse arrived. There is
           | reason to suspect that those great nomadic tribes where
           | heading to a population collapse of the bison herds because
           | the horse and guns enabled over hunting (but of course
           | Europeans arrived before that could happen, and did their own
           | number on the herds).
        
         | Pay08 wrote:
         | This is becoming more and more common. I recently read an
         | article about the male genetic material's influence on
         | pregnancy complications and it included a similar blurb about
         | women's rights and colonialism (don't ask me how that last one
         | is related). Like, just state the findings and your conclusions
         | from them. No need to attempt to save the world.
        
           | throwawaypath wrote:
           | >it included a similar blurb about women's rights and
           | colonialism
           | 
           | Obligatory mantras, like Muslims repeating the takbir.
        
         | mbauman wrote:
         | That's quite amusing; you don't see the connection between
         | "magical powers" and sidelining real intellectual achievements?
         | 
         | Also, Madden is not a master's student anymore. He's a 62 year
         | old doctoral candidate and the lead author on this study.
        
           | sublinear wrote:
           | I do see the connection. That was my point. We went from
           | overt racism (by the oppressors alleged by NBC) to covert
           | racism (by NBC themselves). We could have done without the
           | virtue signaling.
           | 
           | I also say "alleged" because in most cases those oppressors
           | are the other half of the family tree for the people we have
           | alive today we're calling some particular outgroup. News
           | organizations like NBC used to treat these topics with more
           | care to avoid "othering" and full awareness that modern
           | subjects are a mixed people with a ton of nuance. This is the
           | USA, for crying out loud.
           | 
           | Now if you really want your "woosh", let's consider the
           | stereotype of native americans owning casinos, and this
           | article is about their ancient dice. :-)
        
             | mbauman wrote:
             | I think you misunderstand me. I'm saying that your "ton of
             | random stories constantly being published about Native
             | Americans apparently being secret geniuses with magical
             | powers" are _themselves_ evidence of exactly the sort of
             | unserious reporting that the researcher ( _NOT_ NBC)
             | claims; they sideline and obscure the realities of the
             | intellectual aspects.
        
               | sublinear wrote:
               | I don't know if you're aware how editors choose what and
               | how to publish, or how much of the journalist's writing
               | gets thrown out.
               | 
               | NBC decided what to assign to the journalist, decided the
               | goals the editor should have in mind, approved the
               | editor's decisions, and ultimately let it publish.
               | 
               | When they push these stories and present them this way,
               | the archaeologist is by far the least to blame even if I
               | disagree with their words.
               | 
               | I'm already aware of the crazy reasons people do the work
               | they love. It's just how the world goes 'round. NBC could
               | have left that crap out along with the other stuff they
               | cut.
               | 
               | I'm very confident the interview was much longer. Neither
               | the interviewees nor journalists have any idea how the
               | story will be spun. Some of these interviews drag on for
               | so long it's practically interrogation tactics to see
               | what shakes out.
               | 
               | It is indeed NBC's decision to focus on the "dice" out of
               | all the artifacts shown. It is NBC's decision to choose
               | the most sensational quotes to run with. It is NBC's
               | decision to go looking for the most colorful people to
               | interview and tap them whenever they want to push a
               | theme.
        
             | fzeroracer wrote:
             | Calling something 'virtue signalling' in 2026 is in itself
             | a form of virtue signalling as to what kind of beliefs you
             | hold. Frankly I think we could all do without those things
             | breathlessly clogging up the page because people want to
             | desperately overreach into what someone said for the sake
             | of making an inane point.
        
       | reaperducer wrote:
       | This is NBC re-hashing a Wall Street Jornal story from a week
       | ago:
       | 
       | https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6...
        
       | jl6 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | tantalor wrote:
         | > They're carefully shaped to produce random outcomes and
         | marked or colored to indicate different sides.
        
           | jl6 wrote:
           | That's not terribly definitive evidence, considering that a
           | great many tools will produce random outcomes when flipped
           | and will have just as much color differentiation as the
           | objects on display here.
        
             | marginalia_nu wrote:
             | Yeah, coins have distinct faces and can be flipped to
             | generate random numbers.
        
       | bhewes wrote:
       | Ah so Vegas is there for a reason.
        
       | dismalaf wrote:
       | The word dice is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
       | 
       | These are 2 sided fragments that, as the most charitable
       | interpretation possible, might look like objects used for
       | divination.
        
       | stevenalowe wrote:
       | Chances are good that dice are as old as we are
        
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