Last year, archaeologists discovered a 500-year-old board game of Mill carved on the walls of an old Polish castle. Just recently, Yale archaeologist Veronica Waweru noticed some odd holes on rocks when she visited the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. After closer inspection, she believes that the pits may have been used as game boards for mancala, going as far back as 5,000 years ago.
Mancala is a turn-based strategy board game which pits two people against each other, with the goal of trying to gather or collect as many stones, seeds, or beans as possible and store them in their home base. The setup requires two rows of shallow holes or pits, and each player has a larger hole at either end of the board where they stored their rocks.
Waweru saw a whole valley filled with these rows of pits, forming what seemed like an ancient rock arcade. Regarding who had formed these game boards, Waweru conjectures that they were herding societies who must have settled in the area around 5,000 years ago, but she also believes that people of that region must have been playing mancala since 10,000 years ago.
As Waweru and her team continue to investigate the site and conduct research there, they might be able to uncover, through DNA testing, the identities of the people groups who settled in that area, and perhaps even the ages of the basin's inhabitants. The presence of these pits may indicate that life in ancient times were more than just constant survival mode. They may have also had time for leisure and play. - via Atlas Obscura
(Image credit: Veronica Waweru/Yale News)