Here's one to blow your noodle: the most radical view says the phalanx is an innovation of the Peloponnesian War. Personally I think the early signs are there in the Persian Wars narrative in Hdt., but the radical view is certainly sustainable in a positivist sense.
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Here is where I think we need to be honest that modern usage and Xenophon's term have diverged. 'Phalanx' typically means more than that when it is used - it's the overlapping shields, the cohesion generated by small polis-communities, etc.
That's why I'd lean more on 'proto-phalanx' or 'early-phalanx' to express a tight(ish) body of citizen-hoplite warriors (with perhaps, some non-hoplites) operating with overlapping shields which doesn't yet fit the strict form of the classical period.
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That said, I'd have to place that proto-phalanx pretty early, unless I conclude the Chigi-vase painter is a concept artist and Tyrtaeus is the first science fiction writer - because they seem pretty clearly to me to be depicting an early form of this thing.
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Obviously though, that developmental approach is a revision to the VDH-Orthodox position, which imagines a 'pure' and almost primeval phalanx deep in the archaic, to be adulterated only later.
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