After dehydrating the jerky I saw some instructions that said you really should cook it in the oven before you make it into jerky to make sure you kill any germs. How many of you may jerky without doing that?
NOPE
Whomever wrote that does NOT understand the process....
Bacteria may be inhibited using old tech in one of four ways that I know available to Historic Average Joe....,
The environment is too dry
The environment is too salty
The pH of the environment is too acidic
Oxygen is sealed off
Now the problem for people in history is that it's easy to disrupt the preservation when only one method is used. So folks in history
combined two or more techniques.
So yes Native Americans and Africans dried fish and meat without salt, over a very low fire, to accelerate the drying. (The smoke helps too)
Native Americans made Pemmican without salted meat, just relying on the rendered fat to seal off the protein (meat) from the air.
Europeans at first for many centuries made salt pork by putting the pork and storing it in salt brine, relying on the salt alone to preserve the meat...
Egyptian commoners who could not afford expensive funeral prep, merely wrapped their dead loved ones in linen and buried the body in very dry sand..., and so these people also became "mummies" but nothing like King Tut. (Hey to bacteria, meat is meat)
BUT...., it was found to be more reliable to preserve food IF you combine two or more of the processes....,
So you combine salt and vinegar in water and you get "pickled" herring or pig's feet, or you do it to cucumbers and get "pickles". They don't spoil even if you added some sugar such as in sweet gerkins or bread-n-butter pickles.
You add a little salt to the meat, and then mix it with fat as an air-seal and you get more stable Pemmican... or Europeans made "potted meat"...which is cooked salty meat in a ceramic pot covered in a layer of fat.
So IF you want jerky, you soak the meat in salted water, then let it drip mostly dry, and then you remove the moisture in the dehydrator. Voila, no bacterial growth, even if it gets exposed to some moisture or the air gets humid, because the salt backs up the removal of the moisture.
Folks that dry cured ham, and then smoked it, added a third preservative..., hardwood smoke, which has chemicals that further contribute to the protection the surface of the ham or bacon. The stuff is shelf stable for years.
So brine your meat for the jerky, and then put it in the dehydrator, which will give good air flow, and some low heat, which merely accelerates the evaporation of the moisture.
You will note that the flavoring substitutes a lot of people use are not "salt", but soy sauce and teriyaki sauce have lots of sodium. Even "lower sodium" soy sauce still has enough to work for jerky.
IF you cannot tolerate sodium, or are making a batch for a person with that dietary restriction, try a "no salt" potassium substitute, OR.... dunk the meat in a vinegar solution, then dry it. You will get jerky
sauerbraten but it will work.
LD
usually my wife makes food while I clean my guns and hunt. Imagine the shock if I removed my 300 savage cartridges from my FART, opened the dehydrator to find half dried meat
i would have to divorce her and then who would cook and clean for me...THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE 
