While individuals may have been little better off (except in being able to have more children without increased child mortality), communities became far better placed to maintain and increase their numbers, ensuring their long-term survival and growth by providing a ready supply of younger producers as each generation aged.

Agriculture led to some narrowing of the range of foods and nutrients through greater reliance on a narrow selection of cultivable crops (grains or roots) or domesticated livestock, but on the other hand it provided a steadier return except in times of natural adversity which presumably impacted similarly on availability of wild foodstuffs.

Above all it allowed for more intensive land use and greater numbers of people: even if diets were less varied, the absolute amount of food available to a community from planting and herding far exceeded that within the range of a hunter-gatherer group.

The consequence is that while diets and labour may have been less exciting, more children could reach adulthood and provide the next generation of producers, whether through increased births or reduced mortality, enhancing the community’s economic and physical security.

Much has been written in recent years about purported hunter-gatherer longevity and a “paleo” dividend from foregoing neolithic toil and dietary monotony, but in fact hunter-gatherer expectation of life at birth seems likely to have differed little from that in agricultural societies.

The degree of nutritional or health sacrifice may thus be overstated in the question: while some hunter-gatherers may live into their 70s, that’s been true of human populations generally through the neolithic to the present.

The difference in absolute numbers (a few million in the paleolithic, tens of millions by the Iron age and hundreds of millions in the middle ages) shows that agriculture offered a decisive advantage, especially when we consider its origin among a very small minority of the then world population.

We may lead duller lives, but sedentarisation offers dividends in deepening specialisation and exchange and growing collective capacity, eventually yielding everything from granaries or irrigation works to universities and hospitals.

Every technological innovation brings some cost, from displacement of handicraft workers by mechanised manufacture to environmental impacts of modern mass consumption. But without them most of us wouldn’t be here.