The First Gamers: How women invented the d2 in Ice Age America

Robert J. Madden’s identification of 12,000-year-old dice across the American West has done more than just reset the clock on tabletop history. It has effectively unearthed the forgotten “founding mothers” of gaming. While modern hobbyist culture struggles with gender inclusivity, this archaeological breakthrough suggests that for the first 10,000 years of North American history, the “game master” was almost certainly a woman.

By re-evaluating 565 artefacts from sites such as Lindenmeier, Colorado, and Agate Basin, Wyoming, Madden has pushed the evidence of human play back by 6 millennia, predating the earliest known dice in the Near East by 6,000 years. However, the most striking insight comes from cross-referencing these d2-style bone dice with the ethnographic record.

The original d2: A legacy of bone and breath

Unlike the polyhedral dice found in modern roleplaying games, these ancient tools were binary. Typically made from bison or deer bone, they featured one polished or incised side and one natural, rough side. Players would toss a set, often four or eight at a time, and calculate scores based on how many marked sides landed face up.

This was not merely play. In the harsh environments of the Pleistocene, these games served as a “social technology.” At aggregation sites like Lindenmeier, where mobile bands that didn’t know one another would gather annually, dice games served as a diplomatic bridge. They provided a fair, regulated system for interaction between strangers.

The Feminist History: Women as the “Math-Minds” of the Ice Age

The gendered nature of this discovery is its most revolutionary aspect. Madden, in his research published in American Antiquity, notes that historically, about 81% of documented Native American dice games were played exclusively by women. These findings suggest that women were likely the primary innovators of the world’s first games of chance.

In his interview with Colorado State University, Madden highlights that these dice represent humanity’s first engagement with probability theory. If women were the primary players, it implies they were the first to master “probabilistic thinking”, a cornerstone of modern statistics, to manage social and economic risk. This tradition of women-led gaming is echoed in historical records of the Plum Stone Game, which the Smithsonian Institution has documented, showing how matrilineal lines preserved these sacred rules for generations.

Robert J. Madden, Researcher at Colorado State University, said in a statement;

Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations… What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were [doing this] thousands of years earlier than previously recognized. It’s possible that that [intellectual achievement] might have been led by women in the ancient past.

As Scientific American points out, this challenges the “Old World” monopoly on intellectual history. Far from being a casual pastime, these games were a central pillar of communal life, as detailed in Stewart Culin’s 1907 monograph, which remains the gold standard for understanding how these bone “counters” shaped the social fabric of North America long before the first Europeans arrived.