How many years old is the oldest known figurative cave painting?

How to get close to this number

Bound it by the species. Anatomically modern humans reached this part of the world somewhere around fifty to sixty thousand years ago, so the oldest figurative art they left cannot be older than their arrival. The answer sits just inside that window, which is the tightest bracket available.

Two details recalibrate the usual mental picture. The comparison in the explanation puts this more than thirty thousand years before the famous European caves, and cave art is culturally associated with one region of France and Spain — which says more about where archaeology looked than about where people painted. And it is a scene, not a single animal: figures arranged around a pig look like the oldest surviving attempt to tell a story.

The word figurative matters in the question. Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment around a hand pressed to the rock, have been dated even earlier, but a stencil is a trace of a hand; this is a picture of something. Deciding that a mark on a wall can stand for an animal is a cognitive leap entirely independent of technology, made by people with stone tools tens of thousands of years before agriculture.