That timeline seems to miss that Yann LeCun was already working on ConvNets in 1988. I don't think anyone waited for the Universal Approximation theorem to start building neural architectures, it was just a tangentially interesting mathematical result.
Which paper are you speaking about? Certainly, I'm always interested in a more complete history. I'm currently on LeCun's page and can't figure out which paper you're speaking to:
More generally, a common trope in NN papers and books is to draw a graph for matrix-vector multiplication and then draw the analogy that these are like neurons in the brain and this represents their connectivity. This is an example of the kind of backwalking biological analogies that frustrate me. Again, certainly, I don't know the motivations behind everyone in the field, but I do contend that many of the more powerful theorems have nothing to do with biology and have other origins.
