Not earlier but rather just some of the early cases. The precise timeline of the outbreak is in any case very sketchy due to the natural circumstance that nobo

Not earlier but rather just some of the early cases. The precise timeline of the outbreak is in any case very sketchy due to the natural circumstance that nobody was testing for it before the Wuhan outbreak, but of course the first time you find something doesn't have to be the first time you could have found it. In https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117 they report that (at the time) the known samples closest to the bat progenitor were collected 3-4 weeks after the outbreak was declared, and could be connected to a cluster (cluster A) of cases connected to Guangdong detected starting from two weeks after the outbreak. It's important to highlight that while these cases were picked up later and outside of Wuhan, the genetics of the viruses were closer to the supposed ancestral bat virus, so in some sense this is a sample of an "earlier" part of the epidemic.