We find stone-age tools for shredding meat, making it easier to dry. Dehydration along with low-heat smoking also preserves well. The word buccaneer started as boucaneer, a guy who hunted game on Hispaniola and turned it into boucan to sell to ship's crews in the Caribbean. It's related to the word bacon.

Beef could be dried, smoked, salted (wet or dry), corned or pickled. Think of that when you have corned beef or creamed chipped (salt) beef, let alone jerky or beef sausage. Sausages were preserved by the spices or chemicals added to them, or by smoking.

When you talk about plant foods, they were dried, stored cold without freezing in root cellars, pickled, fermented (OMG, I had an apartment neighbor who fermented her own kimchee. Postman reported her to the health dept for having something dead and rotting, like a pet or child), salted, dried. I'm trying to remember what culture only baked bread once a year and kept it hanging in the rafters. I believe it was the Russians who made an iron ration by dipping rye bread in honey, then drying it. Honey prevents mold.

Hale reports that raw beef will keep three days in the Roman summer. People would let meat "glaze", the surface liquid dry, to preserve it a couple of days longer. If flies were bad, you scrubbed off the glaze before proceeding to cook.

Sources:

Hazlitt, Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

Hale, The Horizon History of Eating and Drinking