I thought of a different and more recent parallel - the move from hunting-gathering to farming, on the order of ten thousand years ago. I don't know if it is a hundred percent authenticated, but it seems to be often said that nutrition quality and health took a step down, in the interest of larger populations and civilisational development.
As with most things, the actual history is a bit more nuanced than that. More recently we've seen a number of places where sedentism and social stratification, hallmarks of civilization, occurred
prior to agriculture. Two examples that come to mind quickly are the settlements of Göbekli Tepe and it's neighbors of the pre-pottery neolithic of Turkey, who were producing monumental architecture and stone-carved iconography a thousand years or more before any sign of crop domestication; and the Tlingit people and related tribes of southern Alaska and Pacific Canada. They had complex societies and established sedentary households, as well as a tradition of slave-holding, without agriculture.
It may be that in at least some cases sedentism and social organization came first, and that agriculture may have been an effect of that kind of culture, rather than a cause of it.
