Interesting article. Allow me to add a few fun details...

Early agriculturalists actually had it much rougher than this article implies for a real kicker of a reason:

Wild plants suck as crop plants.

Maize was domesticated from a bushy grass called teosinte (Agriculture arose independently in the Americas a little later than in the Middle East). Google that and see how closely it resembles the big juicy corn-cobs you're used to. Where corn has giant cobs crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of big juicy kernals, teosinte has a miserly amount of sad, pathetic, and tiny little kernals. You'd have to grow an entire field full of teosinte to equal the output of a small patch of corn. If a modern farmer saw one of his fields being overgrown with teosinte he'd probably spray it with herbicide. If some contagion wiped out all of our crop plants and we had to go back to wild crops we would be absolutely humped as a species. Now, imagine how difficult it must have been to come up with the idea of settling down and growing crops to live on when the crops you could grow were basically weeds!

In fact, teosinte was so far from being a viable crop that some have proposed theories about intermediate steps. For example, consider the Beer (or chicha) theory of civilization! Somehow, somebody discovered that you can ferment teosinte into something that tastes weird and makes you act even weirder. Fun stuff! While teosinte was not a crop you could build a viable farm on, maybe some hunter-gatherers stumbled upon the process of making chicha. At first, collecting wild teosinte would have taken a lot of work. Far too much for the calories yielded. However, they probably had the time for the occasional novelty! Being lazy, these hunter-gatherers probably realized they could scatter some of the seeds they collected in a specific spot, continue their wanderings, and find a much denser patch of wild teosinte in the same spot a year later. They might even have started selecting which seeds to scatter, either fortuitously preferring the smaller ones for flavor or being smart enough to deliberately select the mutants with higher yields to sow for next year. Perhaps the first steps towards agriculture (in the new world at least) were taken by the paleolithic equivalent of frat-boys! Actually, no archaeologist would ever say that. They would instead say, "priests and shamans" used the beer for religious ceremonies. (Hot tip: If archaeologists have no clue what something they find is for, they usually say it has "possible religious significance".) It makes no real difference what their reasons were. In this theory, the selective breeding of teosinte to produce maize can start long before people actually have to rely on maize to supply much in the way of calories. Humankind's urge to get plastered may have ultimately led to civilization!

Wait! There's more! Proponents of this theory have also pointed out that beer solves a lot of problems early civilizations probably had. Take water quality for example. If a lot of hunter-gatherer's with no concept of germs or hygiene were to settle next to a river, you can bet that the river would be pretty deadly to drink out of before too long. Fortunately, if you take some water, combine it with grain and ferment it, the result is a tasty fermented beverage that is safe to drink thanks to the wonders of alcohol! (Early fermented beverages probably had a pretty low alchohol content and packed a healthy dose of calories. Perfect for quenching the thirst and nourishing hard working agriculturalists from dawn till dusk!) I could go on for a while...

TL;DR - Beer, rather than being an evil byproduct of civilization, may be what gave us both agriculture and civilization! Beer is good.

Ham-fisted attempt to tie this back into all-things entrepreneurial: The development of agriculture was a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't have agriculture without crop-plants, but how could we have developed crop plants without agriculture? Beer. Sometimes, something that looks like a total waste of time becomes the foundation of very serious things (TM), such as the whole of human civilization. Thanks to the adderall-fuelled march of progress we now get to see this process play out in a matter of years or even months! Keep your eye on frivolous crap!