ABSTRACT
In the utilisation of living resources there has been a long-term trend of a transition from gathering or hunting to cultivation or husbandry. The essential basis of support for the large majority of the human species for thousands of years has been farming rather than hunting or gathering, and hunting and gathering as cultures have in general survived into the modern period in areas unsuited by climate or relief to farming; these cultural forms have also survived in some isolated locations, as in Australia before European settlement. The main source of food, and of some necessary materials for most human societies, has been the raising of crops, whether from seeds or from cuttings: and this has been supplemented in most cases by livestock husbandry, as a source both of food protein and of necessary materials like wool and hides. Domesticated livestock also played essential roles in pre-industrial societies in both transport and traction. While systems of farming, including both domesticated crops and livestock, are known to have evolved over more than 10,000 years, fish farming was slower to appear, and conventional fishing, which is still culturally at the stage of hunting and gathering, continues to provide the major part of the world’s fish supplies. However, fish farming in fresh water is known to have been practised for over 3,000 years in the case of China, and was known in some degree in classical times in the Mediterranean world, where it extended to some farming of the edge of the sea for the oyster species, as it also did in the Far East. In much of Europe there was an expansion in fish farming from the Medieval period, and relatively sophisticated pond management had developed by the fifteenth century (Matena and Berka 1987:4-5).
