Origins on Pony Agriculture + Culture · 2:47am Apr 13th, 2017
Hello all, I've been reading a lot on the origins of agriculture for humanity, and I thought it'd be interesting to do figure out the origins of agriculture for ponies as well.
For these musings, I'm assuming that ponies were like humans and had to develop agriculture from essentially nothing.
First off, we know that ponies have domesticated real world plants based on the extreme amounts of pastries, ice cream, and other foods shown in the cartoon. So, we have our end point. What about our starting point?
Humans began as hunters and gatherers, and I imagine ponies were rather similar. Hunting I'll leave vague as this post is concerned plants, not with whether ponies are omnivorous or not (I, for the record, believe they are), but they were definitely gatherers and grazers. We've seen them eat hay and other grasses or outright noxious weeds such as daisy sandwiches, and they consume fruit regularly as well so any fruit edible to humans they'd likely take advantage of.
So ponies likely existed in herds at the beginning, traveling in plains likely (based on real world habitat of equines), gathering and grazing what grasses and fruits or nuts they could gather. Their habitat likely extended past this, as they could gather more foods in forested locations that equines normally could not.
Now, we have a starting point. Humanity started developing agriculture with the advent of greater population centers necessitating greater food production that wild gathering and hunting could not sustain. Greater population centers meant rising social structures from simple family units to chiefs, religious groups, and so on. Ponies, interestingly enough, might have had a somewhat different development.
That is, ponies have a distinct advantage over humans: their diet is much more varied than ours. Humans are limited to primarily consuming the fruit of select plant species, with plant species that have edible bodies or leaves or roots being even lesser in number than fruit bearing plants. Ponies are not so limited. They could eat the fruit of a grass, but could also eat the leafy body or potentially eat leaves of bushes or trees and shrubbery. So, they can eat almost everything humanity can in addition to having a much greater edible biomass available to them.
Now, it must be said that leaves and such of grasses or shrubbery and trees are generally lacking in energy, so ponies would have to eat a lot of them to meet their daily caloric intake. This reduces their nutrient quality somewhat, but ponies still have an advantage over humans in two ways. They can eat the fruits of plants just as humans could in addition to the bodies of the plants, here fruits being grains and such of grasses.
So, in short, ponies have a much wider variety of edible plantlife to sustain them than a similarly numbered group of humans would. This means that the same square kilometer area could likely support twice or three times as many ponies as it would humans without agriculture.
I brought this up because that means a higher population of purely grazing/gathering ponies without agriculture could be sustained on a given section of land. This means that social structures could become more complex than mere family or extended family groups. So, the start of pony civilization might have preceded agriculture. They developed it eventually, obviously, but this is an interesting possible departure from human development.
Now, how would agriculture start among ponies? Well, I suspect it would be much like it was among humans. Increased population necessitated increased food supplies that wild grazing and foraging simply could not supply, or, alternatively, wild pastures yielded less due to climate change and agriculture of particular plants that could grow in stressed conditions become more profitable. As for how agriculture particularly developed, it likely started in latrines.
Seriously. Ponies eat the plants, poop out the seeds, and they sprout. Some ponies eventually noticed edible plants growing where they had latrines, and eventually put two and two together.
So, lets paint a scenario.
We have an earth pony village over here on some plains. The population has increased quite a bit since the village's founding, and can no longer depend on wild pastures to feed its populace. Agriculture is the answer, and visitors have spread the taught the technique (possibly other ponies, could be another sentient species-who is not particularly important here). So, what is the first crop or crops to be grown by these ponies? (this would be limited by what is available to them, of course-they could hardly grow wheat if it was native to a continent six thousand miles away in a remote valley no one had ever visited)
Well, if we look to the development of agriculture among humans, we see that cereal crops were among the first crops to be domesticated and routinely cultivated. In particular, the big eight neolithic crops humans domesticated were crops, emmer and einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax were cultivated in the Levant. These plants offered relatively easy harvesting (in comparison to other grains that were difficult to husk or had wide dispersing seeds), large yields, and relative high carbohydrates and protein percentages.
But, ponies aren't human. They can eat grasses, and based on the show they do enjoy grasses and hay. Considering grazing tendencies, I think it's more likely that they might go for a grass first, rather than a cereal crop due to the fact that every part of a grass is edible to ponies. Additionally, grasses could be turned into hay for long term storage during poor growing seasons or winter months.
So, since I don't have a nice list of grasses ponies from the show like, I'll go with what real world equines like the most.
...
It's alfalfa, in case you didn't know.
Taken from this website: http://www.myhorseuniversity.com/resources/eTips/September2011/Didyouknow
I haven't verified the websites validity, but it matches up with knowledge I gathered working and living on a farm in a country town during my teenage years.
Alfalfa hay is one of the best legume hays fed to horses. Legumes are higher in protein, energy, calcium, and vitamin A than grass hay. Most horses will readily consume alfalfa hay. However, because of its high palatability, intake must be restricted to keep horses from overeating and becoming colicky. Alfalfa hay has 120 percent more energy per unit in weight than oat hay. Therefore, it takes less hay to meet a horse's nutrient needs when feeding alfalfa hay. However, the high-energy content may lead to overfeeding and to a fat horse. If cured correctly, vitamin C content will be high. The calcium:phosphorus ratio is about 6:1 and must be considered when feeding young, growing horses. A mixture of legume and grass plants is the best type of hay to use for some horses or geographical areas.
Close seconds might be oat hay, timothy grass, or clover.
Wheat is often thought of as a cornerstone of civilization due to just how many billions it has fed throughout history, but for ponies Alfalfa or a similar grass was likely the first crop to be cultivated extensively. Other crops followed of course, but grasses are likely among the first plants actively cultivated and harvested by ponies.
Now, something I've been doing is keeping tribe vague-I've just said "ponies" over and over again. Well, considering ponies can breed together, I'm considering them one species.
This means, in my mind at least, that ancient ponies didn't really concern themselves with different tribes-earth ponies, unicorns, and pegusi lived together in herds, likely fullfilling different roles.
Earth ponies, due to an affinity with plants, might have led herds to the best and most nutritious or tastiest plants. Pegusi due to the ability to fly and cover long distances could scout out areas or act as lookouts, and unicorns might have taken on a more defensive role due to their magic.
Tribal identity likely didn't develop until well after pony civilization had begun, whereupon the tribes as a whole split up. Here, it's entirely possible that Pegusi regressed to an extent. Based on the show and them dwelling in the clouds, it's likely they didn't bother with farming on the ground and either foraged/grazed or extorted earth ponies for food. Unicorns may have tried something similar, although I doubt any unicorn society outright abandoned agriculture. Earth Ponies, for their part, likely never strayed from agriculture once they had started. They have an innate affinity for plants, and can cultivated crops better than the other tribes.
Interesting.
I've always liked the idea that pegasi evolved to hunt fish. (Possibly because of the wet feathers look
) That would be long before agriculture though, and there's nothing to stop a pegasus from obtaining fish for a whole herd.
Given that the three types can interbreed, and as seen in the show can give birth to different types that either of the parents based on their ancestry, it's interesting that you see them cooperating. What sort of circumstance could cause the tribes to segregate in the way they supposedly did prior to the great migration? It seems like doing so would have required active intervention, since ponies would continue to give birth to other tribes for several generations.
I'm not the first to wonder how pegasi give birth, if they don't know in advance whether the foal will float on clouds or not.
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I personally like the idea that ponies as a whole are omnivorous and took advantage of meat whenever they could-particularly pork and chicken- but pegusi in particular would have favored fish simply because they could get at the best off shore schools. In fact, pegusi cloud cities were likely nomadic, wandering the land, but for much of the year they likely stuck to the coast to take advantage of fishing. It's very likely they only came further inland during harvest times to either trade with earth ponies or unicorns for food or, more likely, to raid them.
Well, that's really difficult to say, but I can make a few inferences. Since they are the same species and breed successfully with one another, I'd say it would have to be after the development of pony civilizations. So, definitely post agriculture.
One thing that could easily have led to the slow separation of ponies into various tribes is a caste system. If a pony civilization had caste but they were separated and not allowed to intermarry, then that could lead to increasing isolation from one another.
Say an ancient civilization had earth ponies relegated to farming, pegusi regulated to weather management an military service, and unicorns in a leadership position. Over time, the tribes would come less and less to see themselves as ponies and take more pride in their individual tribe. Well, say this civilization violently collapsed-could have been due to a great famine, could have been to an outside source, could have been civil war, point is it collapsed. But, the consequences would be the same.
Pegusi survivors would easily be the most isolationist simply for their ability to flee to the skies and construct cities there. Given several generations with little contact with other tribes and only gathering food from the surface, and you have a tribe that identifies strongly with itself and others. Earth Ponies and Unicorn survivors could simply had fled in different directions and reestablished themselves elsewhere without the other, and over time established their own distinct culture.
By the time routine contact was reestablished, they would have had their own unique customs and traditions separate from one another, which could have led to the antagonism they had shortly prior to the Wendigos arrival.
I'm listening to Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons right now, so pegasus isolationism is on my mind.
Hm, you have some very interesting and plausible ideas here, and your thoughts about tribal divisions coming later makes a lot of sense from a genetics standpoint, but there is one important physiological detail that you missed. Their short, thick, flexible limbs capable of exerting a lot of force in unusual directions and small bodies suggest that they are adapted to maneuvering and possibly climbing in a complex environment, while their proportionally wide hooves will greatly reduce their ground pressure and help them walk on soft surfaces. That makes me think they started out in overgrown wetlands of some form rather than open plains. This is also supported in the case of pegasi by the small size of their wings and the nimble maneuvers we have seen Rainbow Dash pull off, particularly tricks like weaving between trees which would be an essential survival skill in these environments. I wouldn't expect that have too big an impact on the general thrust of your theory, but since you are doing serious world building here I figured I should point this out.
Also, on the subject of pony adaptations, I don't think their high sugar intake is random or stylistic. A large brain requires a lot of energy to function, and even if the ponies probably did occasionally eat meat, it clearly wasn't a big enough part of their diet to provide the energy their brains need. If it was, they'd be eating it all the time just like we do, and they clearly don't in the show so we can easily rule out omnivorism as the solution to this problem. The obvious solution to this problem is high sugar content foods since sugar delivers a lot of metabolic energy very quickly and easily, so I suspect they evolved with a plant like sugarcane as a major part of their diets and probably cultivated it very early on in their history. It's also possible that this high sugar plant is what they use in their normal hay dishes, although realistically those are probably a blend of several species and the exact blend probably varies from store to store and dish to dish.
That could fit in with your caste system theory quite nicely.
Unicorns: Ugh! Go stay over there, you dumb birds, and keep us supplied with fresh fish.
Pegasi: It's quite nice over here without you mud-botherers. Why are we giving you stuff?
Honestly, it's the segregation between earth ponies and unicorns that's harder to unravel.
Hmm... well this is rather interesting, very much so. And there's some more interesting comments going on down below, hmm...
i don't have much to tell myself, as my headcanon on pony civilization is more or less the same as what's going on in the comments and journals, that and my internet is being a douche so I wouldn't have time to go into detail myself >.>
But nice!