Before AI, we just had insane people.
Birds with hands
How does this make more sense? They can’t bend their beaks the same way we can bend our thumb and finger
Touch the tip of your index (also known as fore finger)to the tip of your thumb. There is no bending involved and you can generate a decent amount of force and pick things up that way.
If you think this is fucked up, birds have tiny little deformed hands on their wings kind of like how animators will reduce the scale of a bone for a part of a model they want to hide.
From the foundational textbook “Garden of Earthly Delights” by H. Bosch et al