I think it is moreso the ability to settle in one place that caused the growth of technology. The hunter-gatherers, no matter how numerous, certainly did not spend their free time building forges and experimenting with metal.

Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).

I must rescind this statement. As a result of these discussions, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, in the chapter "To Farm or not to Farm," makes clear the disconnect between agriculture and sedentary living:

"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.

Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."

(<i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> p. 106)

It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.

They didn't suddenly become smart and you certainly cannot attribute all the developments to the adoption of agriculture. Progress has been very... erratic (can't find the right word) throughout history.

To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.

Agriculture is not exactly the reason for technological advances; rather, progress became possible (but not guaranteed!) thanks to agriculture.

While a few hunter-gatherer societies lived in a place so abundant that they can settle in a single location and gather everything they needed, the vast majority of such societies were migratory, moving to wherever the food was.

In a migratory society, most technological advances are simply not useful. When you only keep the things you can carry on your back, anything that doesn't have a direct use is an active hindrance with a quantifiable opportunity cost. Civilization is only possible when people can settle in one place.

Further, even hunter-gatherer societies that are fortunate enough to settle in a single place have to remain small to survive, or they exceed their food supply. This means that the chance of a given society developing a new technology is much smaller (given a smaller supply of creative individuals). It also means that even if a society does develop a new technology, that technology spreads very slowly, leading to less cross-pollination with other individuals and ideas.

By contrast, agriculture concentrates people together. There are a variety of technologies that increased the productivity of an agricultural society as a whole, and it's very natural for those technologies to spread throughout a society. Furthermore, agricultural societies that are more productive than their neighbors can produce more soldiers (when a smaller percentage of the population can feed the whole society, there is excess labor for armies, as well as other pursuits), allowing them to conquer their neighbors and spread their advances to their newly conquered territories. Basically, in an agricultural society, technology spreads like a virus.