I searched on /r/AskHistorians and Google, but couldn't really find anything on this, so hopefully this question is good to go.

I love steak and beef roasts (as do many other people), and medium rare, more or less, is the preferred temperature, or doneness, that many people including myself eat their beef (or tuna, or deer, or duck, and so forth).

However, where did that line of cooking and thinking come from? I guess intuitively it tastes better and it's more tender, but that can be subjective and depending on each individual's own tastes and palate. I also consider back in the day, where perhaps there was a knowledge of cooking raw meats killed off bacteria, and to make sure food-brone sickness were to be keep to a minimum via cooking with fire, so we simply decided before to cook stuff all the way through, until one day someone decided to not cook their cattle roast all the way through, and then slowly and gradually more people started to eat their meats at lower temperatures.

The jist of the question would be if we always liked our foods that way, or if we grew accustomed to it.