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Chapter 1 Fishing and the Fishing Industry A BRIEF HISTORY Fishing in the Early Times Humans have been fishing for millennia, and fishing is one of the oldest human activities. Fishing has played an important role in human livelihood since the prehistoric times, developing gradually when they moved from the unplanned collection of food to the more systematic way of harvesting and storing suste- nance.1 For example, during the Mesolithic Age (between 10,000 and 6,000 BC), forest areas expanded due to the warming of the climate, and this made hunting for bison, horses, and other land animals more difficult. Humans, consequently, began cultivating plants and breeding domestic animals. Impor- tantly, they started settling permanently along the banks of rivers and lakes so that they could fish.2 Many of the species that we catch today, such as Pacific salmon, have been harvested as early as 7,500 to 10,000 BC.3 Early humans caught fish by hand and with the help of weirs in rivers.4 Later, they developed fishing gear to help them catch fish more easily and in larger quantities. In fact, fishing gear is among the oldest tools, and humans began using these tools earlier than any other artifacts surviving today.5 Archeol- ogists recovered the earliest fishing gear, the bone harpoon, from a site in present-day Congo, dating back to 90,000 years.6 Modern humans are credited for having created successively cleverer artifacts thereafter, with examples including stone fish traps (75,000 years),7 knotted fishing nets (35,000 years),8 and fishhooks that were made of shells and neatly crafted stone, bone, and horn (23,000–18,000 years).9 In the Americas, a culture of fishers can be traced back to 4,000 BC, where early settlers lived by hunting, fishing, and collecting their food. A great majority of Indian tribes lived almost exclusively on fish, such as salmon, herring, cod, and halibut, because the upstream spawning migration patterns of the fish, as well as the concentrations of fish populations near the coasts, made it easier to harvest them.10 Early humans used marine species for other purposes as well. Cave paintings and rock carvings discovered in South Africa and Namibia, for example, suggest