<P> Nearly 340 caves have now been discovered in France and Spain that contain art from prehistoric times . Initially, the age of the paintings had been a contentious issue, since methods like radiocarbon dating can produce misleading results if contaminated by samples of older or newer material, and caves and rocky overhangs (where parietal art is found) are typically littered with debris from many time periods . But subsequent technology has made it possible to date the paintings by sampling the pigment itself, torch marks on the walls, or the formation of carbonate deposits on top of the paintings . The subject matter can also indicate chronology: for instance, the reindeer depicted in the Spanish cave of Cueva de las Monedas places the drawings in the last Ice Age . </P> <P> The oldest known cave painting is a red hand stencil in Maltravieso cave, Cáceres, Spain . It has been dated using the uranium - thorium method to older than 64,000 years and was made by a Neanderthal . The oldest date given to an animal cave painting is now a pig with a minimum age of 35,400 years, at Timpuseng cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia . </P> <P> The earliest known European figurative cave paintings are those of Chauvet Cave in France . These paintings date to earlier than 30,000 BCE (Upper Paleolithic) according to radiocarbon dating . Some researchers believe the drawings are too advanced for this era and question this age . However, more than 80 radiocarbon dates had been obtained by 2011, with samples taken from torch marks and from the paintings themselves, as well as from animal bones and charcoal found on the cave floor . The radiocarbon dates from these samples show that there were two periods of creation in Chauvet: 35,000 years ago and 30,000 years ago . One of the surprises was that many of the paintings were modified repeatedly over thousands of years, possibly explaining the confusion about finer paintings that seemed to date earlier than cruder ones . In 2009, cavers discovered drawings in Coliboaia Cave in Romania, stylistically comparable to those at Chauvet . An initial dating puts the age of an image in the same range as Chauvet: about 32,000 years old . </P> <P> In Australia, cave paintings have been found on the Arnhem Land plateau showing megafauna which are thought to have been extinct for over 40,000 years, making this site another candidate for oldest known painting; however, the proposed age is dependent on the estimate of the extinction of the species seemingly depicted . Another Australian site, Nawarla Gabarnmang, has charcoal drawings that have been radiocarbon - dated to 28,000 years, making it the oldest site in Australia and among the oldest in the world for which reliable date evidence has been obtained . </P>

The most ancient examples of art found in caves throughout europe served to