Ten thousand years ago, humans entered the revolutionary Neolithic Age, where we exchanged our spears for ploughs. Now we are doing it again in the oceans.

As the climate warmed, following the last Ice Age, Stone Age people went through the most remarkable revolution in human history, changing from hunters and food gatherers into farmers. 

The term Neolithic means "New Stone," for the development of new stone tools that enabled people to cultivate the soil, domesticate animals and, for the first time, produce more food than people needed. That meant that some people could make a living doing other things besides providing food, such as shop-keeping, building roads, cities, pyramids, empires, weapons of mass destruction, and eventually, broadcasting a science program on the radio.

In other words, modern civilization blossomed out of the Neolithic Age.

It's been a remarkable ride. But as our population swelled from less than 10 million at that time to 7 billion today, it is obvious we have run out of land to farm, while the number of hungry mouths continues to grow exponentially. We need another revolution in food production and to do that, we must look to the seas and science.

The oceans were largely excluded in the Neolithic revolution. We continued to hunt and gather as much as our nets could hold. Now that we've pretty much swept the oceans clean, it makes sense that fish farming is filling in the need.

Most of the salmon, rainbow trout, shrimp, tilapia and mussels that you eat today has come from watery farms. In fact, Aquaculture is already the world's fastest growing food production system, and now rivals wild-capture fisheries as a source of the world's seafood.

It works, but not without its problems. In the same way that the "Green Revolution" changed agriculture on land, a similar revolution is needed to give aquaculture a boost.

In the 1940s, following the "dust bowl" in North America and famines in different parts of the world, the pressures on the land to supply food were already obvious. The development of chemical fertilizers (an offshoot of weapons production) increased the fertility of the soils to such an extent that we could enjoy prosperity and continued population growth through the 50s and 60s.   

Now, we've pushed the soils about as far as they can go, so genetics has taken over, modifying crops so they grow faster, in wider areas, and are more resistant to pests and weeds.

In Canada, we've had GM corn, canola and wheat for decades, with no evidence of harm to human health.

Now fish farming wants to take advantage of the same technology, with the introduction of the first fast-growing, genetically-modified salmon that will be available commercially.

As with GM crops, there is opposition and fear that "Frankenfish" are dangerous to both people and wild salmon stocks. It is true that fish farming has had problems with pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild ones, issues with the type and amount of fish food, as well as the energy required to pull it off. But every new technology has early problems and they are manageable with proper regulation. It worked on the land; it can work in the sea.

To put it into context, if all 7 billion of us were to join hands in a single line, we would reach around the Equator 400 times, or reach all the way to the moon and back 18 times. In other words, we are bigger than the Earth. It's going to take all the science and technology we can think of to keep us fed, especially considering there will be another billion of us in less than 15 years from now.     

(And if you want to hear more about the problems and challenges associated with having a population of 7 billion, tune into Quirks & Quarks this week.)