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I wonder if they were part of the original set of shortcuts or is this an inheritance/legacy of OS X's UNIX roots?

They weren’t part of the original set of Mac shortcuts, and couldn’t have been. The keyboard of the first Mac didn’t have cursor keys, nor did it have a control key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#Macintosh_Key... ).

Cursor keys came with the numeric keypad; IIRC, control keys debuted with “Saratoga”, the extended keyboard in 1987 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#Apple_Extende... )

I’ve read somewhere that they’ve been there since the NeXT days.

The Cocoa Text (Input) System maps shortcuts on Cocoa method selectors via a plist, so it makes sense that it originated at NeXT.