No, he/she meas everywhere:
> Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.
Did you actually look at the details? It's literally in rule #1:
> 1 . Any observations you add must be the first photograph(s) of that species anywhere. If an observation is the first one for that species to be uploaded to iNat, but other photos of that species from an earlier point in time already exist anywhere elsewhere online/in print, then that observation should not be added to the project. This is the biggest source of observations that I have to remove from the project. So your observation must be both the first photograph of that species on iNat and also the first anywhere.
I was just trying to be polite with the "as far as I can tell", really. Of course I did look at the details, otherwise I wouldn't know them.
Spring is coming on here and it's getting a lot of use in our house! Don't even have kids.
I'd defend it over ChatGPT if you're prepared to wait. So many knowledgeable people using it. A classic example of the best way to get a correct answer being to post a wrong one!