From the Vault: The Nutcracker
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, it's Saturday, so we're heading into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published on December 14th, 2023, and it's about the Nutcracker. Yes, the object, the tool, the invention, the Nutcracker.

Yes, that's right. And this, of course, is the precursor to an episode that we'll be rerunning later this month on The Rat King, the pair of holiday episodes that came out last year. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And ooh, I can almost smell hot cocoa and peppermint because the Christmas spirit is alive today. We're doing our holiday episode and we're going to be talking about the Nutcracker as promised in the last episode.

That's right. On Tuesday, we discussed the Rat King and, of course, how that relates to the Mouse King, the enemy of the Nutcracker. From the original source material for Tchaikovsky's 1892 ballet, we talked about this. It's the work of

German dark romantic author E.T.A. Hoffman, an 1816 short story titled The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. So we talked a good bit about monstrous, moldy-headed rats, and the original short story does feature some just horrific visions of this dreaded entity. But today, it's time to talk about the protagonist of this story. Yes, it's the Nutcracker. Rob, when you were a kid, did your family have like a classic style Christmas decoration Nutcracker with the lever and the jaw? Yeah.

I think we always had one around or there was at least a Christmas ornament that had a nutcracker on it.

Um, but I don't remember, we certainly did not have a functional nutcracker, at least as far as I can recall. I remember enjoying the, uh, creepy inhuman mechanics of like how far the jaw would open and the, and the very, uh, the squareness of it. You know, I liked the fact that it had corners and it was almost like the, the pharyngeal jaw of like the xenomorph or something. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, and it's something that you can toy around with. And yeah, and even if it's decorative and you're a kid, if you're left alone with it, you're going to end up trying to crack some nuts in that weird jaw of the Nutcracker. Now, I feel like most of you know exactly what sort of Nutcrackers I'm talking about here. You know, he's an old-timey soldier or king standing up, made out of wood, has a tall hat, big teeth, and a movable jaw that works via a lever. So the lever is positioned on the Nutcracker's back,

You pull up on the lever and this opens the jaw. Insert a nut.

push down on the lever or pull down on the lever, squeeze down on the lever, however you apply it, and the force is going to cause the jaws of the nutcracker to close, cracking the nut. That is, of course, if you're using a functional wooden nutcracker, many of the ones you encounter today are purely decorative. They were never meant to actually crack a nut. Some of them even have like little capes on, clearly making the lever inaccessible if there even is a lever back there.

Yeah, I recall thinking this about the nutcrackers of my youth. It was like, this does feel flimsy. I don't know if it would stand up to a nut. Yeah, many times we don't even need to crack the nuts, right? We're receiving our nuts already in some sort of a snack mix. They've already been cracked. Sometimes

Cracking is not entirely necessary. You get a nice bag of pistachios. They're only going to be those problem pistachios that you're going to have to crack later. The rest you can open by getting your salty fingers in there and then eventually having to slip your fingernail into the crevice and pry them open that way. Ooh, but if you apply force in just the wrong way, it'll kind of like nick your nail and pull it back. That's a creepy feeling I don't like.

Yeah, but it's satisfying. You know, it's one of those things that is it's like deeply embedded in our genes. You know, the idea that, oh, here's a nut. I've got to crack it. And then I've got this sweet reward. And now I'm going to keep doing it again and again. It does feel so biologically deep that it's like one of our primary metaphors for just solving a problem, cracking a nut. That's right. Got to crack that nut. It is a problem to be solved, but there is a reward and there's got to be a way into it.

You know, at least this is often like you can't just give up on that pistachio that can't be opened or that nut that seemingly can't be cracked because, you know, there's something good in there. Now, quick anthropology note. There is a primate species. This is Paranthropus boisei.

which upon discovery in 1959 was dubbed Nutcracker Man due to the skull's large back teeth and jaws. I included an image of a reconstruction of this particular skull for you here, Joe. Oh, yeah. This looks like the opposite of my childhood Nutcracker. I think that the owner of this skull could have dominated some nuts. Yeah.

This would make for an interesting, monstrous adaptation of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Have your multi-headed Mouse King and all fierce and disturbing, but then also have your Nutcracker be Nutcracker Man. Now, we'll dive into deeper history concerning just nutcracking here in a minute.

You know, we'll get into other traditional ways of cracking nut, some anthropomorphic in nature as well, like our Nutcracker soldier. But first, let's get to know the wooden German Nutcracker a little bit better. So in looking around for various sources, there does seem to be one individual in particular who stands out, and it's the Nutcracker lady, and that's Arlene Wagner.

who is an author, has written books about nutcrackers, and is also the co-founder of the really fun-looking Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth, Washington. And she points out that standing wooden nutcrackers like these, like the traditional holiday nutcracker as we know them, these were known in 19th century German as Nussnackers, listed as such in the Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm.

Many of these were made in the Ursgebirge region and would have been the ones to inspire Hoffman in his writing of The Nutcracker and The Mouse King. And they were not all powered by lever, as it turns out. Some of these were powered by screw. I included an image of a screw-based nutcracking nutcracker for you here, Joe. Yeah.

But they've all got that, whether it's screw or lever, they've all got the mustache. The mustache is essential, as is the tall hat. But the screw guy, he has just kind of like a wide circular mouth, sort of a mouth. And in there you see the screw. But basically, you would just drive the screw home into the top of the nut and the gradual force would bust it.

With the screw guy, I kind of miss the like mouth of Sauron style teeth that we have in the ones with the levers. It does seem like a design misstep because part of the whole fun that like the whole reason you could imagine that someone created a humanoid nutcracker is because it moves like a jaw and you're putting something into this little guy's mouth and making him smash it.

This guy with the screw that comes down from the roof of his mouth, like down through his palate to break open the nut, like this just, it doesn't feel as natural. It feels like someone improved upon the design and destroyed the spirit in the process. But again, these are also classic nutcrackers. Fair enough.

Now, apparently there was a bit more variety in the design until around 1872 when one Wilhelm Fuchner produced the first commercial nutcrackers based on like one singular design. This was not like a factory situation. It was just using a lathe. But this like apparently kickstarted sort of the...

the canonization of what a nutcracker is and what it should look like. And his family still produces these, according to Carol Rosenblatt, who wrote an article on Atlas Obscura just earlier this month about the history of the nutcracker.

Now, Wagner writes that decorative wooden European nutcrackers in general, like not necessarily soldiers, date back to the 15th and 16th centuries in England and France. And these traditions continued on during the 18th and 19th centuries. So you saw a great deal of ornate wooden nutcracker craftsmanship eventually in the Alpine regions of Germany and Italy. Because

Because, again, there's nothing about a nutcracker that demands that it be shaped like a soldier. We're talking about a tool that is a simple lever. And then at various points, people have decided to fancy it up a bit because you can just have something that, you know, crab claw crunchers are basically the same thing, crab crackers. Just a simple lever to allow you to apply the necessary force to break a shell open, be it the shell of a crustacean or the shell of a nut.

But people just end up having fun with it, creating luxury items even that are still to some degree functional. And then you can't help but let your imagination run wild. Is it the mouth of a man? Is it the mouth of a beast? The legs of a beast? Perhaps it has nothing to do with actual anatomical movements. You just want to add some beautiful motifs to the overall nutcracker. Now, according to Noreen Malone, writing for Slate in 2010,

The German Nutcracker dolls, the standard ones that we're talking about here that look like soldiers, were at least considered good luck in German traditions. And I've seen other sources at least loosely allude to some sort of apotropaic properties as well. You know, the idea that this soldier is going to frighten away evil spirits or bad luck or something to that effect.

So, you know, the idea that something not only could be lucky, but it could also keep ill luck, keep bad spirits away. This, of course, is not uncommon with artifacts of this basic nature, you know, because look at the standard nutcracker. It has a fierce face.

Oftentimes it has kind of big and alarming eyes, and certainly it's not blinking. So you could imagine easily leaning into the idea of putting this character on guard against your enemies. This seems to connect with traditions as old as the ones we talked about in our series on necromancy this October in ancient Mesopotamia, where you would have these little phantoms.

figurines that might look like a warrior or a king or something that would be there to ward off ghosts and demons that might want to attack you in your sleep.

Yeah. And so perhaps Hoffman was playing with this concept a little bit in his writing of the original Nutcracker story. You know, the Nutcracker is a protector in this, but also he turns things on its head. He is also something that needs protecting. He needs to be protected by Marie. I should point out that, yes, the little girl's name is Marie in the original story, even though I believe she becomes Clara in the Nutcracker ballet.

So we'll get back to traditions of nut-cracking technology here in a bit, but to give this the proper sort of invention treatment, we really need to go back before that. We need to get back to the basic idea of cracking nuts and, indeed, why...

crack a nut anyway? And why does the nut need to be cracked? Great question. So what are nuts? We know them when we see them and we can list a bunch of examples, but botanically, what are they? And I've actually found some rather different definitions offered in seemingly authoritative sources, but to synthesize as best I can, here are the main points. First of all, nuts are fruits.

Yes, they are fruits. We don't usually think of them this way. So this raises the question going one step back further. What is a fruit in a botanical sense? A fruit is usually defined as the mature, ripened ovary of a flowering plant which contains the plant's seed or seeds.

So according to scientific classification, fruits include lots of foods we do normally think of as fruits like apples, peaches and oranges, but lots of other fleshy things that grow off of plants that we don't usually think of as fruits, even foods like cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados and chili peppers. And in fact, technically, even grains like wheat and oats are a type of fruit.

So a fruit is a mass that grows from the reproductive structure of a flower and ends up containing or bearing the fertilized seed of that plant. The form of the fruit is designed by evolution to help the seeds disperse, which could mean taking the form of a delicious snack that animals will want to eat and then swallow and then deposit elsewhere in a nice healthy pile of dung. But there are other animal dispersal strategies we'll get to in a minute. So

So according to the Encyclopedia of Fruit and Nuts, edited by Yannick and Paul, nuts are a specialized subcategory of fruit, quote, characterized by a hard shell that is separable from a firmer inner kernel. So it's a fruit that's got an inside kernel and a hard shell on the outside. Now, to offer some of these contrasting definitions, I'm

I found a different source by the USDA Forest Service that claimed that, quote, nuts are strictly a particular kind of dry fruit that has a single seed, a hard shell and a protective husk.

Also adding to the confusion is the fact that there are some things that are generally classified as nuts by people, but are not nuts in the botanical sense. Classic example is a peanut. These are technically legumes. And in this episode, I am sure we will casually refer to some of these false nuts as nuts. It's just going to happen. Just be aware that some, quote, nuts are not technically nuts.

But to come back to the synthesis definition here, among other possible criteria like bearing a single seed or having a husk or maybe having high oil content or something like that, the common thread seems to be that nuts are fruits that evolved a hard shell. But why?

But why? How does the plant benefit from having a hard shell around its fruit and seed as opposed to a nice, soft, fleshy seed capsule like a tomato or like any of these other soft, fleshy fruits where, you know, the plant in an evolutionary sense wants the animal to gobble them up and carry them away and poop them out somewhere? Yeah.

Well, I found a paper that explains one important evolutionary strategy of nut-bearing plants, and I think this is really interesting. So the paper was by Stephen B. VanderWaal called How Plants Manipulate the Scatter-Hoarding Behavior of Seed-Dispersing Animals, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, in 2010.

So this paper is about interactions between plants and animals, particularly plants and an animal behavior called scatter hoarding, in which the animal and you can picture a squirrel, but there are a bunch of different kinds of animals that do this as well, primarily birds and rodents.

in which the animal or the squirrel will collect a bunch of food items in hidden caches to be stored for later. So our squirrel runs around gathering up a bunch of nuts fallen from under a tree, and instead of eating them right away, the squirrel will carry them off to bury or hide somewhere for later, maybe in lots of locations all around the squirrel's territory.

Now, why does this benefit the plant for the squirrel or other animal to do this, to run off with a bunch of nuts, take them somewhere else and bury them? Well, in some cases, the storage caches of plant seeds will benefit from reproductive fitness enhancements via animal dispersal. And we've talked on the show before about the reasons that it is good for a plant to have its seeds dispersed geographically away, taken away from the parent plant.

There are multiple reasons for this, but just one example is now if they're dispersed far away, the offspring plant will not have to compete with the parent plant for access to sunlight. Parent and child will not be fighting against one another to get the sun.

But in many cases, these scatter hoarded caches will be forgotten or otherwise abandoned by the animal that made them, allowing the seeds to germinate and grow in the places they were hidden.

So squirrel takes a bunch of nuts, stashes them all over the place, buries them, hides them. The squirrel will go back and get some of them later and eat them. But some of them, the squirrel's never going to get again. They'll just be wherever they are, and they might have a chance to sprout and grow.

Plus the world can be pretty rough on a squirrel. So even if the squirrel remembers where those nuts are, it doesn't mean that squirrel is going to be around to come back and claim them later on. Right. So VanderWaal explains how plants have evolved to encourage scatter hoarding behavior in animals and why it helps them. So, you know, it is good for the plant to get animals to practice scatter hoarding with its seeds. How does it get the animals to do that?

First of all, by producing seeds that are delicious and nutritious, so they are highly attractive to animals as a food. But second, here's the important one for our question about why nuts have hard shells. By imposing what VanderWaal calls handling costs, that mean the animal cannot feasibly eat all of the seeds immediately upon discovery. And there are two main strategies mentioned for increasing these handling costs.

One is by lacing the nutritious seed or fruit with chemicals that make it hard to digest, such as tannins, which kind of slows down the buffet, you know. But then the second thing is by putting in place physical barriers that take time and energy to break through. So here's our hard outer nut shell. The hard shell of a nut makes it impossible for the squirrel to just gobble up all of the fruits immediately. Right.

They want that good stuff inside, but each one is going to take time and energy to open and access. So the animal is encouraged to take the nuts away and hide them for later.

Now, there are a couple more strategies VanderWaal mentions as well. One is masting. This is, quote, where a population of plants synchronizes reproductive effort, producing large nut crops at intervals of several years. Mast crops not only satiate seed predators, but also increase the amount of seed dispersal because scatter hoarding animals are not easily satiated during caching.

causing animals to store more food than they can consume, but are satiated during cash recovery. So does that make sense? There's a lot of nuts, and because they take time to get into, the scatter hoarding animal is going to be hungry while they're gathering all these nuts, so it just eats.

encourages them to keep gathering more and more nuts and storing them and planting them for the plant. But then they will get full on these nuts when it's finally time to recover the cash and crack them open and eat them. So they're probably not going to get to all of the stuff they stored. Basically exploiting a real eyes bigger than one's stomach sort of situation with the squirrels.

Exactly. And then the last strategy mentioned here is by having seeds that don't put off strong smells, making them harder for the animal to find later after they are hidden. So really just sort of helping the squirrel or bird or whatever animal forget where it put some of its nuts.

So according to this theory, hard nut shells are part of a suite of strategies used by plants to aid in seed dispersal by animals like birds and rodents, which makes it more difficult for the animal to eat the nut, making it more likely that the animal will carry the nut off and hide it or bury it somewhere later and then possibly forget about it or for whatever reason never come back to it, allowing the plant to germinate in its hiding place.

Hard nut shells, you could think of sort of like a speed bump in the eating process. They make it hard for the bird or the rodent or whatever to just like blaze through whatever it finds. It can't just eat it all at once. ♪

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But to come back at this from the animal's perspective, nuts are great. Animals want to eat them. So how to get the good part out? Animals do have strategies for getting at those good parts, even if...

while benefiting from the nuts, they do crack open and eat. They're sort of inadvertently helping the plant by not getting to a lot of the nuts they store. Let's look at a few strategies here. One is brute force, you know, teeth, jaws, beaks or bills and other intrinsic mechanisms that allow an animal to crack or punch through hard nut shells.

We've already mentioned that rodents are a major consumer of nuts in the wild, but also other hard substances. And rodents like rats, squirrels, and beavers have an adaptation that helps them in this regard, which is their incisors, pairs of front teeth at the top and bottom that, unlike our teeth, continuously grow throughout the rodent's life.

So this means rodents must gnaw on things and also must grind their front teeth to maintain good dental health. Rat incisors not worn down by continuous gnawing can grow into bizarre, unsettling spiral shapes. They go off, and this is obviously really bad for the rat.

And while having teeth like this imposes a burden to constantly be gnawing and grinding the teeth together, it also helps equip rodents to put their front teeth through some serious abuse because the teeth will just continue growing in and the grinding will continue to sharpen them. So, you know, if an adult human cracks a tooth, that's sort of a permanent problem. Rodents like rats can just let their teeth keep growing in so they can put them through a lot.

Rodents like rats also have very strong and specially adapted jaw muscles for their size, specifically the masseter muscles and their special teeth and chewing muscles help them cut through tough barriers like nutshells.

Of course, on the larger end of the animal spectrum, you've got bigger animals that just have big teeth, big jaws that can pretty easily crush through nutshells. For example, elephants and some wild pigs. You know, if you've got big enough jaws and teeth and stuff, crushing a nutshell isn't that hard. I even found one report of gorillas allegedly cracking nuts with their teeth. So there's some question about that.

To what extent this comes with significant risk of tooth damage to the gorilla. And then also some birds such as like jays, blue jays will collect nuts so that they can break through nutshells with their bills. But some other animals have a different strategy, which is just, you know, swallow the nuts whole and let the gizzard work it out.

Wild turkeys are an example here. Turkeys eat a lot of nuts, such as wild pecans, but they don't bother cracking them or chewing them. There's just no need. They gulp the whole thing, shell and all, and then it goes to the gizzard. And the gizzard works essentially like an internal jaw.

It is a part of the bird's digestive system, a sort of muscular sack in which foodstuffs are churned around with externally acquired abrasives like rocks and sand, which the turkey also swallows. And eventually this muscular sack churning nuts around with rocks and sand grinds the nuts or whatever food into pieces so it can pass on down through the rest of the digestive tract.

See, we need more gizzard based nutcrackers. Maybe the screw nutcracker is kind of a gizzard nutcracker in a limited sense. I, yeah, it would be like, what would a gizzard based nutcracker be? It would be more like a, like a rock polisher. You know, you put the nuts in there and it's got like an internal like shaker with rocks and they, they bust them up. Yeah. Yeah.

So those are the internal mechanisms, but there are also animals that do use external mechanisms, in other words, tools to crack nuts. Tool use in nut cracking has been observed in multiple primate species. I came across a paper documenting novel observations of orangutans figuring out how to smash nuts with a wooden hammer.

The paper was by Bandini et al. called Naive Orangutans Individually Acquire Nutcracking Using Hammer Tools, published in the American Journal of Primatology in the year 2021. And I found the background section of this paper interesting.

helpful for collecting other documented examples of primate tool use in nutcracking, especially the use of tools by chimpanzees to open nuts. The authors say that chimpanzees, long-tailed macaques, and capuchin monkeys have been observed using tools to break through nut shells, and wild chimpanzees have been observed in multiple locations, you

using hammer tools to smash nuts and access kernels. So to read from their background, quote, the crux of the nut cracking behavioral form in chimpanzees involves three steps. One, retrieving a nut from the surrounding area and placing it on an anvil, e.g. a tree root or a stone.

2. Picking up a stone or a wooden hammer and 3. Hitting the nut with the hammer, holding it with one or both hands, until its shell is cracked open and the inside kernel can be retrieved and consumed.

And it's this is noted as being a really interesting case of tool use in non-human animals, because most cases of animal tool use involve only a single object and a single type of action. You know, thinking something like using a stick to extend reach into holes and crevices. But this nut hammering process involves two separate tools apart from the nut, the hammer and the anvil.

And it involves multiple steps only culminating in a food reward at the end of the process. So it's extremely interesting and impressive and has been the subject of a lot of study and debate. And there are also interesting scientific debates about how this process first arose in wild chimpanzees and how it gets passed from one individual to another.

But anyway, coming back to the experimental portion of the study in orangutans, the authors here tested naive orangutans who had no experience cracking nuts with tools that were in captivity to see what they would do if given hard shelled nuts and tools for nut cracking, but no demonstration of how it was done. So just like here's the stuff you would need, but there's no teaching or showing them.

And somewhat shockingly, quote, out of 12 orangutans tested, at least four individuals, one from Leipzig and three from Zurich, spontaneously expressed nutcracking using wooden hammers. Fascinating.

I thought so, too. And they say that this result seems to be evidence that orangutans can, in fact, quite readily produce emergent tool use behaviors through through individual learning. They say just sort of personal trial and error learning without having to watch another do it and copy the behavior from them. Those.

Though they did say they actually make a distinction in this paper between non copying social learning and copying social learning. So copying social learning is what they call like the how to knowledge where you watch another individual do something and then you copy what they're doing.

They do say there could be some social learning involved here that's not watching what the other individual is doing, but just seeing kind of like what area of the enclosure they're paying attention to, what kind of objects they're paying attention to and so forth.

In the words of the authors, not how to social information, but sort of what and where social information. And then finally, just wanted to mention that this has also come up on the show before, but there are some bird species that have evolved ways of using external tools to crack nuts and

One of the most interesting examples is the case of Japanese crows, specifically Japanese crows, because as far as I know, this behavior has not been found in crow populations elsewhere. But Japanese crows have been observed leaving difficult nuts on busy streets so that cars will run over them and crack the shells for them. That's fascinating, man. To you, it's a highway. To us, a nutcracker. Yeah.

So coming back to humans, specifically coming back to modern humans, modern humans absolutely can crack nuts with their teeth. This is a true statement. However, modern humans absolutely cannot crack all nuts with their teeth, and they certainly can't do so without risking permanent damage to their teeth.

All right. Again, we are not rodents. Their teeth will keep growing in if they hurt them while getting into a nut. Not so much for an adult human. That's right. So as such, there is a huge advantage, even a survival advantage, in being able to turn to various tools to crack open said nuts and get at the precious nutrients inside. And of course, then not be held and also not be held back by the speed bumps so much. I mean, you are hitting the speed bump of having to manually crack nuts, but

But if you can utilize technology to speed that process along, then you can do a whole host of other things. That's right. As such, prehistoric humans made use of their surroundings to open many a nut, much in the same way that other tool-using animals did in the examples that we just mentioned. Stones, of course, do wonders. And eventually, this was fine-tuned to make use of pitted stones, which

pitted stone, you know, stone that has a little indentation there, kind of a spot that holds the nut in place.

while you either whack it with another stone or use some sort of like hammer and chisel scenario to apply force to it. And this will also sort of collect the fragments and keep the nut and or fragments from just flying off in all directions. In terms of getting over the speed bump and speeding up the process, this is a great advancement actually using a pitted stone like this. It's sort of moving from the hammer and anvil principle to the mortar and pestle principle.

Now, according to Wagner, examples of this sort of artifact go back thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, according to, I was looking at a 2019 paper published in PLOS One or PLOS One. I forget which way we're supposed to say it these days. It's PLOS. PLOS. I said it wrong for years. I spelled it out. It's PLOS. All right. Well, PLOS One, 2019. This was a paper by Colleen Pardot titled,

Kwondong Stones, a specialized Australian nutcracking tool.

And in this, the author points out that Paleolithic sites in the Levant provide evidence of the importance of nuts in the human diet as far back as 740,000 to 790,000 years ago. And we see this via the evidence of specialized stone implements for shell cracking and kernel extraction. Additionally, early Holocene sites suggest that hazelnuts were important in Mesolithic and early Neolithic European diets. Hmm.

The paper in question, by the way, highlights the use of pitted stones by Aboriginal Australians to crack open the Kwondong or native peach. They point out that pits in stones like this are common and they sometimes indicate other functions. It's not always there for nutcracking. It could be an anvil or it could have multiple functions. But the stones in question have multiple pits and were found in areas where Kwondongs are

common. They also analyze the exact nature of the wear and tear on these stones. Apparently, if you know what you're looking for, you can analyze that wear and tear and see like, okay, what kind of regular and or repeated force was applied here? And they believe that these artifacts indicate nutcracking.

I included a couple of pictures here from you below. One is from Wagner's Museum. You see like a basic pitted stone nut cracking scenario. And then I have some images from this paper about Aboriginal Australian artifacts. And you can see like multiple pits in one of the stones they're talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

By the way, broadly speaking, nuts cracked in this manner were sometimes, of course, just eaten raw. You know, you've solved the puzzle. Now enjoy the spoils. But they were also eventually used for other purposes. You could make flours out of them or nut butters. There's apparently evidence for peanut butter of a sort in Aztec and Inca civilizations that

And one can only assume that ancient European hazelnut scavengers would have done something similar, though, of course, without access to South America's chocolate, they'd be denied the invention of Nutella up until, I believe, the 1800s. Are you a Nutella lover, Rob?

I mean, I like Nutella, but I deny myself Nutella. It's too easy. It is. It needs some speed bumps. It needs speed bumps, yes. The speed bump I put down is just not buying it.

Now, coming back to other nutcracker designs, obviously simple wooden nutcrackers are also a pretty ancient scenario. You know, likely some combination of wood pieces, perhaps a strip of leather, exactly the sort of thing to easily vanish from the archaeological record. Like this is just organic matter that's not going to last.

But eventually, with the advent of metalworking, humans began making simple nutcrackers, which are also, again, largely identical to crab claw crackers, that enable them to use hand strength and a lever to crack nuts. This, again, is the basic principle of the German wooden nutcracker that we associate with Christmas.

Wagner writes that the oldest evidence of a metal nutcracker goes back to the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Apparently, this nutcracker is on display in the Toronto Museum in Italy. It's exceedingly ornate, consisting of a pair of bronze hands with gold bracelets.

making use of an internal hinge to function as a nutcracker. Obviously, this is a luxury item. And really, the subject matter here is quite fascinating. I included an image of this nutcracker device for you here, Joe. That is creepy looking.

Yeah, they're like these bronze hands with golden, like they're dark bronze hands with golden like serpent bracelets. And it's like they're reaching up out of the void to crack a nut for you.

Yeah, exactly. Hands from the portal to the underdark. It's just like extremely creepy looking though. When I first saw these, I didn't realize these were, um, just solid to be used with the lever to crush. What I honestly imagined was that these were like rigid metal gloves that you would put on to just smash a nut between your palms. Yeah.

Yeah, I was looking around to see some sort of a video or demonstration of exactly how the mechanism works. There supposedly is a mechanism there, but most of the images I was pulling up just show the hands and

and yeah, they're, they're quite beautiful to look at. Now Wagner's museum, museum apparently has a Roman nutcracker dated to between 200 BCE and 200 CE. And this one is also ornate with animal motifs, but it is, it is otherwise like not something that mimics human or animal crushing power, no jaws or anything. I included an image of this for you here as well, Joe. It's just the standard pincer lever. Yeah. And,

And of course, you know, they're all manner of tools and objects in human history that have been turned into something ornate and something even more decorative than functional. But again, there's something about the Nutcracker. There's sort of even though it is work, there's also sort of an implied leisure there. Like it is the kind of work that you can imagine even an emperor being OK with doing because there is something satisfying about it. Yeah. Maybe it's because the food reward is less.

in most cases implied to be immediate, but I know exactly what you're saying that like,

There's a different energy to a nutcracker versus like a potato peeler. So you imagine the process of peeling a potato is labor. It's not associated with fun. It's just something you've got to do in the process of cooking something. But that's not the same. Yeah, not the case with a nutcracker. The nutcracker is an emblem of coziness and leisure and getting what you want right now. Yeah, it's like a novel technological enhancement of human abilities.

It's like, look what I can do. That's nothing compared to my strength, as my strength is accentuated by this tiny wooden man that cracks my nuts for me.

Now, Wagner also showcases multiple European metal nut trackers from the 13th century onward. And many of these, I didn't even include pictures of for you, Joe, because they just look like metal lever tools. You know, it's just exactly all that you would need to crack nuts and nothing fancy. But they sometimes take on other fanciful forms. I included a couple of images from her museum here. One is, I believe, an eagle and the other is a dog.

OK, does the eagle crush the nut in its beak, I guess? Does the beak pop open? It looks like, yeah, I believe the beak is powered by the lever. And then we also have the dog, which I guess the tail is the lever for the dog's mouth.

You know, I really enjoy the grotesque unreality of the way that the humanoid nutcracker's mouth opens so wide with the lever. I don't think I would have that same enjoyment with the dog figure. Do you think it's just not becoming of the dog? Yeah, I don't know. A man whose jaw opens down to his belly button and has gigantic teeth bigger than his eyes. That's funny. A dog that has that? I don't know. It's just like, I want it to be cuter. Yeah.

Now there's another variety of metal nut opening, I guess you would say tool that I want to touch on here. Uh, it's one that's also hinged often of bronze or iron. Uh,

But these are nut openers found in various Asian cultures, including in India, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan. Many of these also boast animal and human design motifs. These were not used to crack open a nut, but to slice the areca nut of the areca palm, which is then wrapped in a beetle leaf. These are beetle nuts.

These are then chewed sometimes with other additives in order to get at the psychoactive properties of the nut.

I included some images of these betel nut slicers, I guess is really the more accurate terminology, though their basic physics of the design is similar to many of the nutcrackers we're talking about here. But as you can see, Joe, and I encourage folks to look up images of these, there are some that look like birds. There are some not pictured here for you, Joe, that are very ornate but don't look like any animals.

any particular animal or what have you. And then some just straight up resemble human beings, sometimes with the handles of the slicer being the legs of a humanoid or the legs of two humanoids that are dancing.

Okay, but it is a slicing action, not a cracking action. So it's more kind of like those little cigar guillotines that people have. I don't know what those are called. Yeah, yeah, I guess it would be similar to that. Yeah, they're for slicing, but they do resemble nutcrackers a lot. And you'll often find collectors of one may collect the other as well. Uh-huh.

Beautiful designs, though. Now, I'd also run across examples of apotropaic uses of these devices as well, such as using them to protect a sleeping child. I also found mention of protective qualities that are attributed to betel nuts in general in some cultures.

There's a 19th century beetle nut cutter from Malaysia in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK. And they have this featured on their website. It has a stylized bird shaped head set with rubies mounted with gold. So very ornate. And the museum shares the following quote, although the habit of beetle chewing had rapidly declined in the Malay world by the mid 20th century,

Iron or rake and nut cutters are still in use today for their power, according to local tradition, in warding off evil spirits. The shears, and I think that's accurate, you can describe these as shears, are usually placed above the head of a newborn baby for protection.

Oh, that's an interesting parallel to the sort of decorative or ritual use of the no longer functional nutcrackers in Christmas celebrations. Yeah. Yeah, I do find it fascinating that you'll have like two very distant cultures here.

And they both have some sort of an ornate device that is used to get at the goodness, be it nutritional or psychoactive, or I think there are also medicinal traditions concerning the beetle nut as well. But to get at the goodness in the nut.

You have to use this device. And then that device becomes more and more ornate. It takes on various forms and then begins to have these supernatural properties as well. Or even if you're looking at the modern nutcracker, like the decorative nutcracker has no function other than to provide a bit of holiday whimsy and to, you know, to put us in the spirit of things for the holiday.

Or alternately to chase your sibling around the house biting at them with.

Now, I would love to hear from folks out there if you have certainly if you can speak from personal experience or family experience, cultural experience to anything that we've touched on in the episode, including the betel nut shears. But but even like the classic German nutcracker, if there's anyone out there who has a like a family tradition in which there are protective elements to it, you know, like the nutcracker is placed in a child's room to ward off some sort of.

You know, ill luck, no matter how overt, no matter how strong the superstition or weak the superstition is. I'd love to hear about that as well. But so I'm partially speaking from my own experience in which the standard nutcracker like doesn't really carry a lot of supernatural or folkloric weight. It is just festive. You know, it's a completely secular thing.

Like the elf on the shelf ends up having more power in a given home than the nutcracker usually does, or at least that's how it seems to me. I'd love to hear if that's not the case, though. Though at the same time, I wouldn't undervalue the ritual power of holiday decorations. I mean, like.

It is interesting how we surround ourselves with these physical objects, literally to sort of engineer our own minds. It's like I want to make myself feel festive. I want to put myself in the mind space of a particular season. And in order to do that, I know I will have to surround myself with objects that are hidden for the rest of the year.

Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's kind of the approach my family takes with our Christmas tree. You know, and this is, you know, I think how a lot of people do it. You know, each little decoration you put up in there, put up on the tree has some sort of value to you. You know, it either speaks to a time or a place or an aspiration or an idea that you like. You know, it has religious significance and or cultural significance. And it all becomes this kind of...

you know, this kind of amalgam of different values. Then you light it up and yeah, you transform your world at least for a few weeks there. All right. Should we crush this nut once and for all?

Let's do it. Yes, we hope you enjoyed our look at the Nutcracker and earlier in the week, the Rat King. If you didn't hear the Rat King episode, go back, listen to that. I think it's a nice companion for this episode. But yeah, obviously, we wish everyone out there who celebrates the holidays, happy holidays. We'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On Mondays, we tend to do Lister Mail. On Wednesdays, we tend to do a short-form Monster Fact or Artifact episode. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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