A new study in American Antiquity suggests that Native Americans played games of chance using dice made with carved bone more than 12,000 years ago. These findings are more than 6,000 years older than the oldest known dice from the Bronze Age.

The objects, called binary lots, were different from the six-sided dice we know today. They were flat and slightly rounded, oval or rectangular, with two unique sides like the front and back of a coin. Players would toss them together and count how many pieces were facing up.

To determine if the ancient objects were binary lots, the researchers compared them to 293 sets of Native American dice recorded in a 1907 study of games played by North American Indigenous peoples.