Time to get ...CRACKING
For the holidays, stores fill their shelves in the Yuletide section with wooden toy soldier nutcrackers depicting the character so loved in The Nutcracker ballet, which was first performed in Russia in 1892 and has become a holiday tradition. Even so, many keep the utilitarian version handy throughout the year.
As with most things, there is more to the nutcracker than meets the gaze of the holidays.
Tools used for cracking nuts have existed for thousands of years. The earliest nutcrackers were probably strong teeth or hammers. Archeologists discovered the first evidence that man developed tools to crack nuts at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, close to the Dead Sea in Israel. There, they found seven varieties of nuts along with some 50 pitted stones reported to be 780,000 years old.
Archaeologists have found similar tools in the United States, dating back 4,000 to 8,000 years, in Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Ohio. Archeologists have discovered nutting stones equally as old in what is now the Sahara Desert. (Nine thousand years ago, monsoon rains would soak the Sahara, supporting lush vegetation – including nuts. It wasn’t until much later that the climate changed, and the Sahara became a desert.)
The oldest metal nutcracker known dates to the 3rd-4th century B.C. Arlene Wagner, the “Nutcracker Lady” from the Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth, Washington,
