Reading bone by heat is attested across a very wide area, from northern China through Central Asia to the subarctic Americas, and the two best documented cases sit at opposite ends of that range.
The Chinese material is the richest divinatory archive in existence. Shang diviners applied heat to prepared ox scapulae and turtle plastrons, read the cracks that resulted, and then inscribed the question, and often the outcome, onto the bone itself. The bones were recognised for what they were only in 1899, after fragments had been circulating as dragon bones in the medicine trade, and excavation at Anyang recovered them in enormous numbers. They give direct access to the concerns of a Bronze Age court: harvests, childbirth, illness, campaigns and the disposition of the ancestors.
The other case produced an argument that has outlived its context. Ethnographers described hunting peoples in subarctic Canada heating a caribou shoulder blade and reading the cracks to decide where to hunt. A paper published in the 1950s proposed that the practice functioned as a randomising device: by removing the choice from human judgement it prevented hunters from returning repeatedly to grounds that had recently been successful, which would deplete them and make the game wary.
Whether that explanation is correct has been debated since, and it is a reminder that a practice may do something useful for reasons unconnected to what its practitioners say it does.