A farmer working a 40 (60... 70... 80...) hour week can produce enough food to feed hundreds of people, freeing them up to do other things. If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.

>If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.

What on earth do you think this proves?

Farmers these days tend to grow a lot more than what is needed to self-sustain or to sustain a small village/tribe.

Hunting and gathering does not scale beyond small population sizes.

Surplus, profit.

It's not about quality of life. It's about fitness, in the evolutionary sense.

Agricultural lifestyles support an order of magnitude more people per unit land, and therefore are more fit, even if they're "worse" in subjective terms.

Also, the "mistake" didn't happen immediately. It's not like hunter-gatherer nomads immediately decided, "yep, we're doing this farming thing" and started domesticating crops and animals. It happened gradually, over thousands of years, with various intermediate shades where a group would do some of both. Over time, human societies got to a point where abandoning agriculture would be impossible, while hunting and foraging became more discretionary.