2nd reply, because when I wrote my first one, your reply was just the first line.

For instance, the idea that early humanoids took the form of “cavemen” who ate a ton of meat is debated, and largely built on assumptions made from finding hunting tools.

I think they were highly seasonal. You had periods where you could gather a lot fruit and plants to eat, your hunting season and your “bare” season where you had to rely on surpluse and preservation. Diet would be highly variable depending on where and when and what resources and technologies were availbible.

The amount of meat eaten in the USA today is not historically common.

Not on average, for sure. But as I said in my first replies, there are examples of early communities that lived almost entirly of meat. Not even a side of fries.

Yeah, it’s just one study but it’s part of a bigger picture.

Once humanity discovered fire and basic techniques for preservation it became viable for groups of people to work together and produce a surpluse of highly nutritious food and the ability to store it for later. And the majority of very early human history is centred around either hunting or fishing communities. That’s how most humans lived before we eventually came up with agriculture, which was just around 10.000 years ago. We were hunter-gatheres for like 200.000, maybe much longer. That’s a timespan that allows for minor gentic adaptations like that, especially if there is a strong evolutionary pressure. Some extreme example would be early civisations in the arctic regions, which sometimes entirly depened on one food source (very often seals).

So I’m pretty confident in saying that taste not just “learned behavior”. Of course there are genetic factors involved, it would be aburd if there weren’t. We are just animals afterall.