Knucklebones & Dice

Before dice, there were bones. The ankle bones of sheep and goats — the astragalus — rest stably on four sides, so a throw yields one of four outcomes. The first random-number generator people held in their hands was a piece of an animal's body. Cube-shaped dice appear in sites in Turkey and the Indus region from around 3000 BCE. In that era, a thrown bone was both a plaything and a way to hear an answer from the gods — divination and play had not yet split apart. I think the pleasure of leaving something to chance, and the seriousness of letting chance decide, were originally the same gesture.