The "agricultural revolution" was slow and reversible

Agriculture wasn't some decisive moment that put us on a singular path. The "revolution" was 4,000 years of gradual experimentation.

Humans societies with knowledge of agriculture have chosen to not use it.

For example, the Yurok of Northern Californian cultivated tobacco but not maize. They knew about maize from their southwestern neighbors. And they chose to gather acorns instead of cultivating them. The Yurok weren't pre-Agricultural, they deliberately chose to not engage in it.

More: Indigenous Americans of the Pacific Coast

And even societies that have practiced full on agriculture have chosen to stop, including the builders of Stonehenge.

Working more

If anything has been progressive in history, it's that we've been progressively working more

Feudal serfs worked less than 8 hours/day.

Hunter-gatherers of the deserts of Namibia and Botswana work only 2-4 days per week, despite the harsh environment. The !Kung and other contemporary hunter-gatherers consciously reject agriculture to preserve their leisure.

(Ethnographer of !Kung Marshall Salinas and other time allocation studies in the 1960s.)

Agriculture didn't force us into cities

The standard story is that cities emerged from agriculture's surplus of food and the increasing concentration of people in a fixed place.

If anything, this idea is backwards. It would be more accurate to say that cities caused agriculture.

Cities hosted the first agricultural experiments. Garden plots, semi-cultivated food forests, alluvial flood retreat farming, each of these emerged within established cities like Çatalhöyük, and Nebelivka.

But there is no necessary connection between urbanism and agriculture. The historical records shows cities without farming, and farming without cities.