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.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible.
That’s my point: if 2 was never plausible in the first place, then changing the proposed origin from Europe to Indonesia doesn’t affect the likelihood one way or the other. Saying the Indonesian evidence supports the African hypothesis without explaining why is quietly letting the implied white supremacism off the hook without calling it out.
It’s been called out for decades now. Explaining the situation every time a non-European site predates a European site of the same type would be beating a dead horse.
But without that explanation, the claim that the Indonesia site supports the Africa hypothesis isn’t true—and it actually reinforces the same Eurocentrism that motivates hypothesis 2.
On the face of it, the claim that representational art originated wherever we find the earliest evidence of it seems innocent enough. And if you really believe it innocently, the Indonesia site doesn’t affect your belief one way or the other. It’s only if you had an underlying Eurocentric motive for believing the earliest-evidence theory that the Indonesia site motivates you to switch to the alternative theory (which at least still credits the direct ancestors of Europeans with the invention of art). So saying the new site supports the Africa theory is taking for granted the Eurocentric worldview that would motivate that switch.
