Mancala

A game played by digging holes in the ground and distributing seeds or stones among them. Because it needs almost no equipment, when and where it began cannot be fixed. The oldest examples that can be dated with real confidence are ceramic boards and boards carved into rock from the Kingdom of Aksum (in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia, sixth to seventh century). There is also a candidate some seven thousand years older. In 1989, a stone slab with two rows of six hollows came up from the floor of a Neolithic dwelling at Ain Ghazal, Jordan, dated to around 5870 BCE. Gary Rollefson, who excavated it, reported it as a mancala board, but Ulrich Schädler countered that the two rows of hollows are not parallel — they converge toward one end — and that it is hard to read as a board at all. A stone that might be the world's oldest game board is itself being argued over, over whether it is a game board at all. It is not settled, so this map leaves both readings standing rather than choosing.