Oh yeah, Raf, I see and it's my turn to be sorry now.
On the other hand, South Eastern European countries such as Hungaria - think of the Komorn swamps and River Danube finds! - or Romania went their own separate ways in developing spectacuar wheellocks as well. For more than 30 years, in my theories I have ardently pleaded for accepting parallel individual strategies/lines of access to the wheellock development, so I am all in your corner as far as this is concerned!
I do bear my doubts though as to whether to look upon early Italian wheellocks as 'earlier in time' than Germanic ones. More archaic they may seem, no doubt.
E.g., please cf. the locks of the earliest datable wheellock/crossbow combination in the Bavarian National Museum Munich, ca. 1521-26 (my personal guess is ca. 1525+, and I have handled it several times, alas without being allowed to take the lock out), and the earliest dated wheellocks in existence, a small Augsburg Marquardt arquebus of Charles V d. 1530, and another, very finely executed, of identical provenance and dated 1531, plus a completely different combined wheellock and snap-tinderlock Munich arquebus in the Liège Musée de l'Armée, dated 1532, the etching by Ambrosius Gemlich, plus an early-1530's wheellock gun in the Royal Armouries Leeds and some detached mechanisms in the Dresden Armory.
Thus we have a line of datet or closely datable wheellocks from ca. 1525-35.
Some of the wheellock combination weapons in the Doges Palace in Venice may be from the 1520's or 1530's but they are not dated, and their earliest combined crossbow and gun seems so archaic that one might assume it was made in the first decade of the 16th century (ca. 1505, as one authority believed), which is probably not true ... I have always tentatively assigned a dating of '2nd to 3rd decade 16th c.' to them, and their axe and gun combination is dated 1551 ...
P.S. It is great to have finally found somebody with a good insight in early wheellocks!!!
Best,
Michael