"the progenitor of known SARS-CoV-2 sequences likely contained three mutations relative to the market viruses that made it more similar to SARS-CoV-2’s bat coronavirus relatives."

So sort of. The virus existed somewhere before the versions sampled in the seafood market, yes. It's possible that it existed in the seafood market but was not sampled there.

There's no way to know where it first existed in humans without more information and the deletion of this early data is definitely suspicious.