Regarding the physical manipulation analogy: I think that there actually is a simple core to the human body plan. This core is, more or less: a spine, two arms with joints in the middle, two legs with joints in the middle, feet and arms with fingers. This is probably already enough to qualitatively solve more or less all physical manipulation problems humans can solve. All the nuances are needed to make it quantitatively more efficient and deal with the detailed properties of biological tissues, biological muscles et cetera (the latter might be considered analogous to the detailed properties of computational hardware and input/output channels for brains/AGIs).
Regarding the physical manipulation analogy: I think that there actually is a simple core to the human body plan. This core is, more or less: a spine, two arms with joints in the middle, two legs with joints in the middle, feet and arms with fingers. This is probably already enough to qualitatively solve more or less all physical manipulation problems humans can solve. All the nuances are needed to make it quantitatively more efficient and deal with the detailed properties of biological tissues, biological muscles et cetera (the latter might be considered analogous to the detailed properties of computational hardware and input/output channels for brains/AGIs).