The reason perhaps being that the switch was not progress but a necessary reaction to a dwindling per capita food supply. Marshall Sahlins' classic article on the paleolithic as an affluent society warned us away from the "onward and upward" view of the neolithic. Why raise crops (and stay around to guard them) if you're sure there'll always be enough to eat? After affluence comes 10,000 years of scarcity, which we call "civilization." And that's not wrong if we see agriculture, urbanization, and class divisions as responses to scarcity.
Ernest Gellner had it right, I think, when he wrote that the Neolithic Revolution "was a tremendous trap. The main consequences of food production and storage was the pervasiveness of political domination ... The moment there is a surplus and storage, coercion becomes socially inevitable, having previously been but optional. A surplus has to be defended. It also has to be divided. No principle of division is either self-justifying or self-enforcing: it has to be enforced by some means and by someone." --CGE
On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Brad DeLong wrote:
> There are deep (and unresolved) questions about whether the neolithic
> revolution was a disaster for human happiness: once you have farms and
> crops, you can't run away from the thugs with spears... Hence the
> glories of the state and the church: it really does look like your
> average human lost a lot of autonomy and perhaps two inches of adult
> height once you switched from hunting-and-gathering to
> farming-and-herding...