Interesting enough, the ancestors of emacs were on a keyboard where the meta and control keys were in the lower-left corner, and it was somewhat expected that you would move your entire hand to do chording on those while using the other hand for the letter keys.

I imagine that resulted in far less pinky-strain.

Knight keyboard: http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/Knight1.jpeg

Later followed up with the space cadet keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard which added super and hyper.