The evidence these days actually suggests that settled villages appeared first and that agriculture developed as a method to allow larger groups of people to live together for longer periods of time.

This means that the real question is, why did people want to live in larger groups in one location for longer periods of time?

This is a question that is under fierce current debate, and as a person active in that research and debate, I can give you my personal opinion and point you to some other researchers.

It seems like there was a shift in worldview that meant that people felt they needed to be living together, and gathering in large buildings for some purpose. The regular nature of these gatherings and the creation of special places for them leads many archaeologists to call them ritual spaces (I would be one of them!). There is also the emergence of lots of examples of the materialization of relationships between people, ancestors, places, and probably animals - such as ritual deposition of human remains, decorated stones, and the use of human remains.

So, what this means is that the worldview that developed in the early Neolithic required people to physically mark places, and to materialize particular relationships. This lead people to live in places for longer and in larger groups. People then needed to develop new strategies that allowed them maintain these larger sedentary populations, which became what today would be called the typical farming package.

Once you have transitioned to farming practices and are philosophically tied to a location, it is almost impossible to stop - come disease or hard work.

Some researchers to explore include: Ian Kuijt Gary Rollefson K. Schmidt Ofer Bar-Yosef (though I disagree with him! Maybe a reason to particularly explore his views!) Nigel Goring-Morris The publications coming from Çatal Höyük and Ian Hodder (though they are later in time, the extensiveness of the remains and intensity of research makes it difficult to avoid in discussions of the Neolithic)