I don't believe anyone has argued hunter-is-better. The question is whether or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the article.

I don't believe anyone has argued hunter-is-better. The question is whether or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the article. They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough to tell. But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable. After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18 centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries before that. Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded them, and you might be on to something. Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.