I am sure cavemen wanted to eat meat—the hard part was obtaining it.
We still age our beef.
Not that hard to trap small animals. Some wouldn’t even need outsmarting, being attracted to the scent of food being prepped by humans. You can catch a seal fairly easily, just go for the slowest one in the crowd heading for the water. And there are fish in the water. In some streams you hardly need a line and bait. There’s also earthworms, they mostly don’t put up a fight.
It’s not all about big game.
If I were a primitive human watching, say, lions, it might cross my mind that to be scary strong, I should eat like one. They like meat.
For me, when I eat carbs, I get hungry in an hour! But meat satiates me for hours and hours.
I wonder when salt, or salty-ish minerals were discovered to be flavor enhancers for foods such roasted meats?
Absolutely! They had meat when they could get it.
One scientist had a theory that the reason people don’t have much hair is we fished animals out of the water. IOW, people were semi-aquatic.
Some of the earliest human settlements had large mounds of clam shells and fish bones, which kind of boosts this theory. It’s easier to grab a clam that hunt a mammoth with a spear.
People in Africa and the South still catch fish by hand.
