From the Vault: The Nutcracker

visions of this dreaded entity. But today it's time to talk about the protagonist of this story. Yes, it's the Nutcracker. Rob.

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 and a nutcracker to close, cracking the nut. That is, of course, if you're using a functional wooden nutcracker. Many of the ones you encountered 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.

there's something good in there now. Quick anthropology note, there is a primate species this is Parenthepus boise eye, which upon discovery in nineteen fifty nine was dubbed nut cracker Man due to the skulls, large back teeth, and jaws. I included an image of reconstruction of this particular skull for you here, Joe.

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 Levenworth, Washington. And she points out that standing wooden nutcrackers like these, like the traditional holiday nutcracker as we know them, these were known in nineteenth century German as nousnachers, listed as such in the Dictionary of the Brothers Grim. Many of these were made in the Erzgebirge 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.

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 eighteen seventy two, when one Wilhelm of Fuckner produced the first commercial nutcrackers based on like one singular design. And this was not like a factory situation, it's just using a lathe.

But this, like apparent kickstarted sort of 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 the decorative wooden European nutcrackers in general, like not necessarily soldiers, date back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and France, and these traditions continued on during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So you saw a great deal of ornate wooden nutcracker craftsmanship eventually in the alpine regions of Germany and Italy. 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, crabcloth crunchers are basically the same thing. Crabcriot crackers just a simple lever to allow you to apply the necessary force to break a shell open, be it the cell 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 in doing it, you know, 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, you know, 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 and twenty ten, 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 it's 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 as 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.

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?

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 flour 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, 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 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 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 the plant in an evolutionary sense wants the animal to gobble them up and carry them away and poot them out somewhere. 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. Van Wall called How Plants Manipulate the scatter Hoarding behavior of seed dispersing Animals, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences in twenty ten.

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 or run off with a bunch of nuts, take them somewhere else and bury them well. In some cases, these 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 squirrels never going to get again, and they'll just be wherever they are, and they might have a chance to sprout and grow.

But second, here's the important one for our question about why why nuts have hard shells, by imposing what Vanderwald 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 nutshell. The hard shell of a nut makes it impossible for the squirrel to just gobble up all of the fruits immediately. They want that good stuff inside, but each one is going to take time and energy to open an access, So the animal is encouraged to

take the nuts away and hide them for later. Now, there are a couple more strategies Vanderwall 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. Massed crops not only satiate seed predators, but also increase the amount of seed dispersal because scatter hoarding animals are not easily satiated during cashing, 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 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.

whatever animal forget where it put some of its nuts. So, according to this theory, hard nutshells 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 nutshells 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 that it can't just eat it all at once, 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 nutshells. 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 they're 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 to their front teeth to maintain

good dental health. Rat incisors not worn down by continuous gnawing can grow into a 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 massiter muscles, and their special teeth and chewing muscles help them cut

through tough barriers like nutshells. Of course, on the larger 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 to what extent this comes with

significant risk of tooth damage to the gorilla. And then also some birds, such as like Jay's blue jays, will collect the 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.

works essentially like an internal jaw. It is a part of the bird's digestive system, a sort of muscular sack in which food stuffs 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.

nuts with a wooden hammer. The paper was by Bandini at All, called Naive Orangutans Individually Acquire nutcracking using hammer Tools, published in the American Journal of Primatology in the year twenty twenty one, and I found the background section of this paper 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 nutshells, and wild chimpanzees have been observed in multiple locations using hammer tools to smash nuts and access kernels. So, to read from their background quote, the crux of the nutcracking 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. Two picking up a stone or a wooden hammer, and three hitting the nut with the hammer, parentheses holding it with one or both hands until its shell is cracked open and the inside kernel can be retrieved and consumed. And 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 nutcracking, 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 twelve orangutans tested, at least four individuals, one from Leipzig and three from Zurich, spontaneously expressed nutcracking using wooden hammers.

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 author, is 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. 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.

force to it. And then this will also sort of collect the fragments and keep the nut and or fragments from just flying off in all directions.

kernel extraction. Additionally, early Holoslene site suggests that hazel nuts were important in Mesolithic and early Neolithic European diets. The paper in question, by the way, highlights the use of pitted stones by Aboriginal Australians to crack open the quandong 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 nut cracking. You know, 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 quand dongs 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 basic pitted stone nutcracking scenario. And then I have some images from this paper about Aboriginal Australian artifacts and you can see like a like multiple pits in one of the stones they're talking about. M 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 initially eventually used for other purposes. You could make flowers out of them, or nut butters. There's apparently evidence for peanut butter of a sort in Aztec and Inca civilizations, and one can only assume that ancient European hazel nuts 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 eighteen hundreds.

But eventually, with the advent of metalworking, humans begin 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 third or fourth century BCE. Apparently, this nutcracker is on display in the Toronto Museum in Italy.

It's exceedingly ornate, considering 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.

there they're quite beautiful to look at now. Wagner's Museum apparently has a Roman nutcracker dated to between two hundred BCE and two hundred 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 including an image of this for you here as well, Joe.

not the case with a nutcracker. The nutcracker is an emblem of coziness and leisure and getting what you want right now.

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.

in a beetle leaf. These are beetle nuts. These are then chewed, sometimes with other additives, in order to get at the psychoactive properties all then I included some images of these beetle nut slicers. I guess is really the more accurate terminology, though they're basic. The 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's some that look like birds, there are some not pictured here for you, Joe, that are very ornate but don't look like any 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.

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 twentieth century, iron araka 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.

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.

But even like the classic German nutcracker, if there's anyone out there who has a like a family addition 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 you know, 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 focal or 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.

different values. Then you light it up and yeah, you transform your world at least for a few weeks there.

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