Dogyote
It’s not a leap at all. If hypothesis 1 is correct then you’ll find cave art all over the world because humans were making cave art before they left Africa. There’s been debate over whether Neanderthals were making art as well, seems like they were imo, and they left Africa well before Sapiens did.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible. It was probably only considered plausible by people with hardly any archeological data who were stuck inside a white-supremacist worldview in 1940. The world has since made some progress disabusing itself of such ideas.
If you’d like a deeper dive into this topic then there’s a book called The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
This is just fearmongering. Oh no the sneaky Chinese cars are mapping our potholes…
Y’all don’t even know what tankies are anymore.