December 15, 2023 • 45 mins
The decorative holiday nutcracker has become a staple of holiday decor and it also constitutes a specialized tool, so in this Christmas themed invention episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the gadget’s European history, its analogs in other cultures and the general history of humans and other animals cracking nuts.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And ooh, I can
almost smell hot cocoa and peppermint. Because the Christmas spirit
is alive today where we're doing our holiday episode and
we're going to be talking about the Nutcracker as promised
in the last episode.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
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
Chaikowsky's eighteen ninety two ballet. We talked about this. It's
the work of German dark romantic author E. Ta Hoffman
and eighteen sixteen short story titled The Nutcracker in the
(00:52):
Mouse King. So we talked a good bit about monstrous,
multi 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.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
When you were a kid, did your family have like
a classic style Christmas decoration nutcracker with the lever and
the jaw.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I think we always had one around, or there was
at least a Christmas ornament that had a nutcracker on it,
but I don't remember. We certainly did not have a
functional nutcracker, at least as far as I can recall.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I remember enjoying the creepy inhuman mechanics of how far
the jaw would open, and the very the squareness of it.
You know. I like the fact that it had corners
and it was almost like the pharyngeal jaw of like
the xenomor for something.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, yeah, you know. And it's something that you can
toy around with. Yeah, And even if it's decorative and
you're a kid, if you're left alone with it, you're
gonna 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 woods, a tall hat,
(02:06):
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 forest is going to cause
(02:27):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah. Many times we don't even need to crack the nuts, right,
we're getting we're receiving our nuts already in some sort
of a snack mix. They've already been cracked. Uh. Sometimes
cracking is not entirely necessary. You get a nice bag
of pistachios, they are only gonna be those problem pistachios
that you're gonna have to crack later. The rest you
can open by getting your your you know your salty
(03:16):
fingers in there and then eventually like having to to
slip your fingernail into the into the crevice and pry
them open that way.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Oh but if you apply force in just the wrong way,
it'll kind of like nick your nail and pull it
back for creepy feeling. I don't like.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It does feel so biologically deep that it's like one
of our primary metaphors for just solving a problem, cracking
a nut.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
That's right, got to crack that nut. It is a
problem to be solved, but there is a reward, and
there's there's got to be a way into it. You know,
at least this is often like a 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
(04:10):
is a primate species. This is Parenthepus boise Eye, which
upon discovery in nineteen fifty nine was dubbed nutcracker Man
due to the skulls, large back teeth and jaws. I
included an image of a reconstruction of this particular skull
for you here, Joe.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Oh yeah, this looks like the opposite of my childhood nutcracker.
I think that the owner of the skull could have
dominated some nuts.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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 b 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
(04:58):
anthropomorphic in name 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,
as an author has written books about nutcrackers and is
(05:21):
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 Erzgeberge
(05:43):
region and would have been the ones to inspire Hoffmann
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 nut for
you here, Joe m.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
But they've all got that, whether it's screw or lever,
they've all got the mustache.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Now, 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. Like basically you would just
you know, drive the screw home into the top of
the nut and the gradual force would bust it.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
With the screw guy. I kind of missed the mouth
of sare on style teeth that we have in the
ones with the levers.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
It does seem like a design misstep because part of
the whole fun that, like, the whole reason you would
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 a screw that comes down from the roof of
his mouth like down through his pallet to to break
(06:52):
open the nut like this just it doesn't it doesn't
feel as natural. It feels like someone improved upon the
design and destroy the spirit and the pros. 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
(07:13):
first commercial nutcrackers based on like one singular design and
this was not like a factory situation, It was just
using a lathe. But this apparently kickstarted sort of the
canonization of what a nutcracker is and what it should
look like, and his family still produces these. According to
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So you saw a
great deal of ornate wooden nutcracker or 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
(08:15):
decided to fancy it up a bit because you can
just have something that is, you know, crabcloth crunchers are
basically the same thing 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
(08:38):
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
(08:58):
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
(09:18):
idea that it's this soldier is going to frighten a
way 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
(09:39):
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 can imagine easily leaning into
the idea of putting this character on guard against your enemies.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
This seems to connect with traditions as old as the
ones we talked about in our series on necromancy the
suck in ancient Mesopotamia, where you would have these little
figurines that might look like a warrior or king or
something that would be there to ward off ghosts and
demons that might want to attack you in your sleeve.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
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
(10:33):
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 nutcracking 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.
(10:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
First of all, nuts are fruits. Huh, 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 plants seed or seeds. So, according to
(11:40):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:24):
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 Yonick and Paul,
nuts are a specialized subcategory of fruit quote, characterized by
a hard shell that is separable from a firmer inner kernel.
(12:48):
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
(13:10):
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.
(13:30):
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
(13:52):
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 poove them out Somewhere. Well, I
(14:14):
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. Vanderwal called How
Plants Manipulate the scatter hoarding behavior of seed dispersing Animals,
published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society b Biological
(14:34):
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
(14:55):
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,
(15:15):
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, the storage caches of plant seeds will
benefit from reproductive fitness enhancements via animal dispersal. And we've
(15:36):
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.
(15:58):
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
(16:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
Right, So, Vanderwald explains how plants have evolved to encourage
scatter hoarding behavior in animals and why it helps them.
So that 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,
(17:05):
so they are highly attractive to animals as a food.
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
(17:26):
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. 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
(17:49):
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. 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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
easily satiated during cashing, causing animals to store more food
than they can consume, but are satiated during cash recovery.
So does that makes 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
(18:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Basically exploiting a real eyes bigger than one's stomach sort
of situation with the squirrels exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
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 nutshells are part of a
(19:32):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:23):
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.
(20:45):
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,
(21:06):
have an adaptation that helps them in this regard, which
is there 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
(21:30):
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
(21:54):
the grinding will continue to sharpen them, so you know,
if an adult human cracks a tooth, that's 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
massive muscles, and they're special teeth and chewing muscles help
(22:19):
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.
(22:39):
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 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
(23:02):
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 that 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
(23:24):
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
(23:46):
can pass on down through the rest of the digestive tract.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
See we need more gizzard based nutcrackers. Maybe the screw
nutcracker is kind of a gizzard nutcracker in a limited sense.
I G.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
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 bust them up. Yea. 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 nutcracking has been observed in multiple primate species.
(24:22):
I came across a paper documenting novel observations of orangutans
figuring out how to smash nuts with a wooden hammer.
The paper was by a bandini at all called naive
Orangutans are individually acquire nutcracking using hammer tools, published in
the American Journal of Primatology in the year twenty twenty one,
(24:44):
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,
(25:05):
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 nut
cracking behavioral form in chimpanzees involves three steps one retrieving
a nut from the surrounding area and placing it on
(25:25):
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
(25:49):
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 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
(26:12):
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 they 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,
(26:34):
coming back to the experimental portion of the study and 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,
(26:55):
but there's no teaching or showing them. And somewhat shocking quote.
Out of twelve orangutans tested, at least four individuals, one
from Leipzig and three from Zurich spontaneously expressed nutcracking using
wooden hammers.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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. Though they did say they actually make
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
but just seeing kind of like what area of 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
(28:18):
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
(28:38):
busy streets so that cars will run over them and
crack the shells for them.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
That's fascinating, man, to you, it's a highway to us
a nutcracker. So coming back to humans, specifically coming back
to modern humans, modern humans absolutely can crack nuts with
their tee This is a true statement. However, modern humans
appbsolutely cannot crack all nuts with their teeth, and they
certainly can't do so without risking permanent damage to their teeth.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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
bump so much. I mean, you are hitting the speed
bump of having to manually cracked nuts. But if you
can utilize technology to speed that process along, then you
(29:37):
can do a whole host of other things.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
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, and the examples that we
just mentioned. Stones of course do wonders, And eventually this
was fine tuned to make use of pitted stones. Pitted stone,
you know, a stone that has a little end in there,
(30:00):
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 then this will also sort of
collect the fragments and keep the nut and or fragments
from just flying off in all directions.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
In terms of getting over the speed bump is 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.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Now, according to Wagner, example of this sort of artifact
go back thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, according to
I was looking at a twenty nineteen paper published in
Plos one or plus one. I forget which way we're
supposed to say it these days, it's plus plus.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I said it wrong. For years I spelled it out.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
It's plus all right, well plus one twenty nineteen. This
was a paper by Colleen Pardout titled Quondong Stones a
Specialized Australian nut Cracking 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
(31:09):
far back as seven hundred and forty thousand to seven
hundred and ninety thousand years ago, and we see this
via the evidence of specialized stone implements for shell cracking
and kernel extraction. Additionally, early Holoceine sites suggest that hazel
nuts were important in Mesolithic and early Neolithic European diets.
(31:30):
The paper in question, by the way, highlights the use
of pitted stones by Aboriginal Australians to crack open the
quondong 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. It could be
an anvil, or it could have multiple functions, but the
(31:52):
stones in question have multiple pits and were found in
areas where quandongs 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 you can
analyze that wear and tear and see like, okay, what
kind of regular and or repeated force was applied here?
(32:13):
And they believe that these artifacts indicate nutcracking. I included
a couple of pictures here from you.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Below.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
One is from Wagner's museum. You see like a 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,
(32:41):
nuts cracked in this manner were sometimes, of course just
eating raw. You know, you've you've solved the puzzle. Now
enjoy the spoils. But they were also 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
(33:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Are you a nutella lover Rope?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I mean, I like nutella, but I deny myself nutella.
It's too easy, it is, it needs some speed bumps,
and so the sump, 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
(33:38):
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 begin making simple nutcrackers,
which are also again largely identical to collect crab clock
(34:00):
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.
(34:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
You here, Joe, that is creepy looking.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, there are 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.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
For you, Yeah, exactly hands from the portal to the underdark.
There's just like extremely creepy looking. Though when I first
saw these, I didn't realize these were just solid to
be used with a lever to crush. What I honestly
imagine was that these were like rigid metal gloves that
you would put on to just smash a nut between
(35:19):
your palms.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
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 yeah,
they're quite beautiful to look at.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Now.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
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. Included an image of
this for you here as well, Joe.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
It's just the standard pincer ever.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, 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 okay with
(36:23):
doing because there is something satisfying about it.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Yeah. Maybe it's because the food reward is 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
(36:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, it's like a novel technological enhancement of human abilities.
It's like, look, what I can do is 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
thirteenth century onward. In many of these, I didn't even
(37:22):
include pictures off of 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.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Okay, does the eagle crushed the nut in its beak?
I guess does the beak pop open?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
You know, I really enjoy the grotesque unreality of the
way that the human awaid nutcracker's mouth opens so wide
with the lever. I don't think I would have that
same enjoyment with the dog figure.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Do you think it's just not becoming of the dog?
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
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. That's just
like I want it to be cuter.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Now, there's another variety of metal nut opening. I guess
you would say tool that I want to touch on here.
It's one that's also hinged, often of bronze or iron.
But these are nut openers found in various Asian cultures,
including in India, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan. Many of these
(38:46):
also boast animal in human design motifs. These were not
used to crack open a nut, but to slice the
aureka nut of the Areca palm, which is then wrapped
in a beetle leaf. These are beetlenuts. These are then chewed,
sometimes with other additives in order to get at the
psychoactive properties all the non included some images of these
(39:10):
beetlenut slicers. I guess is really the more accurate terminology.
Though they're 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
(39:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Okay, but it is a slicing action, not a cracking action,
so it's more kind of like those little cigar gillotines
that people have. I don't know what those are called.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, I guess it would be similar similar to that. Yeah,
they're there there for slicing, but they do resemble a
nutcrack a lot, and you'll often find collectors of one
may collect the other as well.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Beautiful designs though.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Now I'd also run across examples of apotropaic uses of
these devices as well, such as using them to protect
sleeping child. I also found mention of protective qualities that
are attributed to beetlenuts in general in some cultures. There's
a nineteenth century beetlenut cutter from Malaysia in the collection
(40:28):
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 twentieth century, iron araka
(40:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Oh, that's an interesting parallel to the sort of decorative
or ritual use of the no longer functional nutcrackers and
Christmas celebrations. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
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 has that is used
to get at the goodness, be it nutritional or psychoactive
or I think they are also medicinal traditions concerning the
beetle nut as well. But to get at the goodness
(41:36):
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 know,
(41:59):
to put us the spirit of things for the holiday.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Or alternately, to chase your sibling around the house biting
at them with.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
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 beetle nutshears, 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
(42:31):
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. So I'm partially speaking from my own experience,
in which the standard nutcracker like doesn't really carry a
lot of supernatural or folkal or weight. It is just festive,
(42:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
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
(43:26):
order to do that, I know I will have to
surround myself with objects that are hidden for the rest
of the year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, I feel like that's kind of the approach my
family takes with our Christmas tree. You know, it's 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
(43:53):
significance and or cultural significance, and it all becomes this
kind of you know, this this kind of an amalgam
of different values. Then you light it up and yeah,
you transform your world at least for a few weeks there.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
All right, should we crush this nut once and for all.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
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, we obviously we wish everyone out
there who celebrates the holidays Happy holidays, will remind you
that stuff. To Blew Your Mind is a science podcast
(44:33):
for core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we
tend to do listener mail. On Wednesdays we tend to
do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and
on Fridays we set aside most series concerns to just
talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ 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 stuf. Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Stuff to blow your mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And ooh, I can
almost smell hot cocoa and peppermint. Because the Christmas spirit
is alive today where we're doing our holiday episode and
we're going to be talking about the Nutcracker as promised
in the last episode.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
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
Chaikowsky's eighteen ninety two ballet. We talked about this. It's
the work of German dark romantic author E. Ta Hoffman
and eighteen sixteen short story titled The Nutcracker in the
(00:52):
Mouse King. So we talked a good bit about monstrous,
multi 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.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
When you were a kid, did your family have like
a classic style Christmas decoration nutcracker with the lever and
the jaw.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I think we always had one around, or there was
at least a Christmas ornament that had a nutcracker on it,
but I don't remember. We certainly did not have a
functional nutcracker, at least as far as I can recall.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I remember enjoying the creepy inhuman mechanics of how far
the jaw would open, and the very the squareness of it.
You know. I like the fact that it had corners
and it was almost like the pharyngeal jaw of like
the xenomor for something.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, yeah, you know. And it's something that you can
toy around with. Yeah, And even if it's decorative and
you're a kid, if you're left alone with it, you're
gonna 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 woods, a tall hat,
(02:06):
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 forest is going to cause
(02:27):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah. Many times we don't even need to crack the nuts, right,
we're getting we're receiving our nuts already in some sort
of a snack mix. They've already been cracked. Uh. Sometimes
cracking is not entirely necessary. You get a nice bag
of pistachios, they are only gonna be those problem pistachios
that you're gonna have to crack later. The rest you
can open by getting your your you know your salty
(03:16):
fingers in there and then eventually like having to to
slip your fingernail into the into the crevice and pry
them open that way.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Oh but if you apply force in just the wrong way,
it'll kind of like nick your nail and pull it
back for creepy feeling. I don't like.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It does feel so biologically deep that it's like one
of our primary metaphors for just solving a problem, cracking
a nut.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
That's right, got to crack that nut. It is a
problem to be solved, but there is a reward, and
there's there's got to be a way into it. You know,
at least this is often like a 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
(04:10):
is a primate species. This is Parenthepus boise Eye, which
upon discovery in nineteen fifty nine was dubbed nutcracker Man
due to the skulls, large back teeth and jaws. I
included an image of a reconstruction of this particular skull
for you here, Joe.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Oh yeah, this looks like the opposite of my childhood nutcracker.
I think that the owner of the skull could have
dominated some nuts.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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 b 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
(04:58):
anthropomorphic in name 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,
as an author has written books about nutcrackers and is
(05:21):
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 Erzgeberge
(05:43):
region and would have been the ones to inspire Hoffmann
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 nut for
you here, Joe m.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
But they've all got that, whether it's screw or lever,
they've all got the mustache.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Now, 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. Like basically you would just
you know, drive the screw home into the top of
the nut and the gradual force would bust it.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
With the screw guy. I kind of missed the mouth
of sare on style teeth that we have in the
ones with the levers.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
It does seem like a design misstep because part of
the whole fun that, like, the whole reason you would
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 a screw that comes down from the roof of
his mouth like down through his pallet to to break
(06:52):
open the nut like this just it doesn't it doesn't
feel as natural. It feels like someone improved upon the
design and destroy the spirit and the pros. 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
(07:13):
first commercial nutcrackers based on like one singular design and
this was not like a factory situation, It was just
using a lathe. But this apparently kickstarted sort of the
canonization of what a nutcracker is and what it should
look like, and his family still produces these. According to
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So you saw a
great deal of ornate wooden nutcracker or 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
(08:15):
decided to fancy it up a bit because you can
just have something that is, you know, crabcloth crunchers are
basically the same thing 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
(08:38):
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
(08:58):
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
(09:18):
idea that it's this soldier is going to frighten a
way 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
(09:39):
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 can imagine easily leaning into
the idea of putting this character on guard against your enemies.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
This seems to connect with traditions as old as the
ones we talked about in our series on necromancy the
suck in ancient Mesopotamia, where you would have these little
figurines that might look like a warrior or king or
something that would be there to ward off ghosts and
demons that might want to attack you in your sleeve.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
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
(10:33):
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 nutcracking 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.
(10:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
First of all, nuts are fruits. Huh, 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 plants seed or seeds. So, according to
(11:40):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:24):
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 Yonick and Paul,
nuts are a specialized subcategory of fruit quote, characterized by
a hard shell that is separable from a firmer inner kernel.
(12:48):
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
(13:10):
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.
(13:30):
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
(13:52):
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 poove them out Somewhere. Well, I
(14:14):
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. Vanderwal called How
Plants Manipulate the scatter hoarding behavior of seed dispersing Animals,
published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society b Biological
(14:34):
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
(14:55):
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,
(15:15):
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, the storage caches of plant seeds will
benefit from reproductive fitness enhancements via animal dispersal. And we've
(15:36):
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.
(15:58):
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
(16:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
Right, So, Vanderwald explains how plants have evolved to encourage
scatter hoarding behavior in animals and why it helps them.
So that 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,
(17:05):
so they are highly attractive to animals as a food.
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
(17:26):
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. 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
(17:49):
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. 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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
easily satiated during cashing, causing animals to store more food
than they can consume, but are satiated during cash recovery.
So does that makes 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
(18:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Basically exploiting a real eyes bigger than one's stomach sort
of situation with the squirrels exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
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 nutshells are part of a
(19:32):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:23):
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.
(20:45):
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,
(21:06):
have an adaptation that helps them in this regard, which
is there 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
(21:30):
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
(21:54):
the grinding will continue to sharpen them, so you know,
if an adult human cracks a tooth, that's 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
massive muscles, and they're special teeth and chewing muscles help
(22:19):
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.
(22:39):
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 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
(23:02):
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 that 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
(23:24):
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
(23:46):
can pass on down through the rest of the digestive tract.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
See we need more gizzard based nutcrackers. Maybe the screw
nutcracker is kind of a gizzard nutcracker in a limited sense.
I G.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
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 bust them up. Yea. 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 nutcracking has been observed in multiple primate species.
(24:22):
I came across a paper documenting novel observations of orangutans
figuring out how to smash nuts with a wooden hammer.
The paper was by a bandini at all called naive
Orangutans are individually acquire nutcracking using hammer tools, published in
the American Journal of Primatology in the year twenty twenty one,
(24:44):
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,
(25:05):
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 nut
cracking behavioral form in chimpanzees involves three steps one retrieving
a nut from the surrounding area and placing it on
(25:25):
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
(25:49):
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 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
(26:12):
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 they 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,
(26:34):
coming back to the experimental portion of the study and 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,
(26:55):
but there's no teaching or showing them. And somewhat shocking quote.
Out of twelve orangutans tested, at least four individuals, one
from Leipzig and three from Zurich spontaneously expressed nutcracking using
wooden hammers.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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. Though they did say they actually make
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
but just seeing kind of like what area of 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
(28:18):
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
(28:38):
busy streets so that cars will run over them and
crack the shells for them.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
That's fascinating, man, to you, it's a highway to us
a nutcracker. So coming back to humans, specifically coming back
to modern humans, modern humans absolutely can crack nuts with
their tee This is a true statement. However, modern humans
appbsolutely cannot crack all nuts with their teeth, and they
certainly can't do so without risking permanent damage to their teeth.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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
bump so much. I mean, you are hitting the speed
bump of having to manually cracked nuts. But if you
can utilize technology to speed that process along, then you
(29:37):
can do a whole host of other things.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
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, and the examples that we
just mentioned. Stones of course do wonders, And eventually this
was fine tuned to make use of pitted stones. Pitted stone,
you know, a stone that has a little end in there,
(30:00):
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 then this will also sort of
collect the fragments and keep the nut and or fragments
from just flying off in all directions.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
In terms of getting over the speed bump is 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.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Now, according to Wagner, example of this sort of artifact
go back thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, according to
I was looking at a twenty nineteen paper published in
Plos one or plus one. I forget which way we're
supposed to say it these days, it's plus plus.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I said it wrong. For years I spelled it out.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
It's plus all right, well plus one twenty nineteen. This
was a paper by Colleen Pardout titled Quondong Stones a
Specialized Australian nut Cracking 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
(31:09):
far back as seven hundred and forty thousand to seven
hundred and ninety thousand years ago, and we see this
via the evidence of specialized stone implements for shell cracking
and kernel extraction. Additionally, early Holoceine sites suggest that hazel
nuts were important in Mesolithic and early Neolithic European diets.
(31:30):
The paper in question, by the way, highlights the use
of pitted stones by Aboriginal Australians to crack open the
quondong 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. It could be
an anvil, or it could have multiple functions, but the
(31:52):
stones in question have multiple pits and were found in
areas where quandongs 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 you can
analyze that wear and tear and see like, okay, what
kind of regular and or repeated force was applied here?
(32:13):
And they believe that these artifacts indicate nutcracking. I included
a couple of pictures here from you.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Below.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
One is from Wagner's museum. You see like a 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,
(32:41):
nuts cracked in this manner were sometimes, of course just
eating raw. You know, you've you've solved the puzzle. Now
enjoy the spoils. But they were also 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
(33:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Are you a nutella lover Rope?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I mean, I like nutella, but I deny myself nutella.
It's too easy, it is, it needs some speed bumps,
and so the sump, 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
(33:38):
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 begin making simple nutcrackers,
which are also again largely identical to collect crab clock
(34:00):
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.
(34:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
You here, Joe, that is creepy looking.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, there are 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.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
For you, Yeah, exactly hands from the portal to the underdark.
There's just like extremely creepy looking. Though when I first
saw these, I didn't realize these were just solid to
be used with a lever to crush. What I honestly
imagine was that these were like rigid metal gloves that
you would put on to just smash a nut between
(35:19):
your palms.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
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 yeah,
they're quite beautiful to look at.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Now.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
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. Included an image of
this for you here as well, Joe.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
It's just the standard pincer ever.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, 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 okay with
(36:23):
doing because there is something satisfying about it.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Yeah. Maybe it's because the food reward is 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
(36:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, it's like a novel technological enhancement of human abilities.
It's like, look, what I can do is 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
thirteenth century onward. In many of these, I didn't even
(37:22):
include pictures off of 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.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Okay, does the eagle crushed the nut in its beak?
I guess does the beak pop open?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
You know, I really enjoy the grotesque unreality of the
way that the human awaid nutcracker's mouth opens so wide
with the lever. I don't think I would have that
same enjoyment with the dog figure.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Do you think it's just not becoming of the dog?
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
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. That's just
like I want it to be cuter.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Now, there's another variety of metal nut opening. I guess
you would say tool that I want to touch on here.
It's one that's also hinged, often of bronze or iron.
But these are nut openers found in various Asian cultures,
including in India, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan. Many of these
(38:46):
also boast animal in human design motifs. These were not
used to crack open a nut, but to slice the
aureka nut of the Areca palm, which is then wrapped
in a beetle leaf. These are beetlenuts. These are then chewed,
sometimes with other additives in order to get at the
psychoactive properties all the non included some images of these
(39:10):
beetlenut slicers. I guess is really the more accurate terminology.
Though they're 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
(39:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Okay, but it is a slicing action, not a cracking action,
so it's more kind of like those little cigar gillotines
that people have. I don't know what those are called.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, I guess it would be similar similar to that. Yeah,
they're there there for slicing, but they do resemble a
nutcrack a lot, and you'll often find collectors of one
may collect the other as well.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Beautiful designs though.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Now I'd also run across examples of apotropaic uses of
these devices as well, such as using them to protect
sleeping child. I also found mention of protective qualities that
are attributed to beetlenuts in general in some cultures. There's
a nineteenth century beetlenut cutter from Malaysia in the collection
(40:28):
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 twentieth century, iron araka
(40:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Oh, that's an interesting parallel to the sort of decorative
or ritual use of the no longer functional nutcrackers and
Christmas celebrations. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
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 has that is used
to get at the goodness, be it nutritional or psychoactive
or I think they are also medicinal traditions concerning the
beetle nut as well. But to get at the goodness
(41:36):
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 know,
(41:59):
to put us the spirit of things for the holiday.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Or alternately, to chase your sibling around the house biting
at them with.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
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 beetle nutshears, 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
(42:31):
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. So I'm partially speaking from my own experience,
in which the standard nutcracker like doesn't really carry a
lot of supernatural or folkal or weight. It is just festive,
(42:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
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
(43:26):
order to do that, I know I will have to
surround myself with objects that are hidden for the rest
of the year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, I feel like that's kind of the approach my
family takes with our Christmas tree. You know, it's 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
(43:53):
significance and or cultural significance, and it all becomes this
kind of you know, this this kind of an amalgam
of different values. Then you light it up and yeah,
you transform your world at least for a few weeks there.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
All right, should we crush this nut once and for all.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
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, we obviously we wish everyone out
there who celebrates the holidays Happy holidays, will remind you
that stuff. To Blew Your Mind is a science podcast
(44:33):
for core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we
tend to do listener mail. On Wednesdays we tend to
do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and
on Fridays we set aside most series concerns to just
talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ 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 stuf. Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Stuff to blow your mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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