Posted earlier and was advised it was too narrow to be a stand alone thread. Hope by changing to what sorts of things I really wanted to find out, it is now broad enough, but happy to revise again if needed!
This weekend, I fell down a bit rabbit hole about the domestication of cats and dogs, and found all sorts prehistoric relationships between humans and these animals, including the Bonn-Oberkassel burial, the Natufian woman and her puppy, and the individual buried with a wild cat on Cyprus.
This got me looking into prehistoric art and depictions of our favorite companions. I found lots of depictions of dogs - pottery from Iran, old rock carvings in Saudi Arabia, paintings at the Bhimbetka rock shelters in India - all sorts of things.
As far as cats go though, there is considerably less. There are of course the lions at Lascaux, but I was hoping to find something more closely resembling a modern day house cat. While I realize cats are understood to have been domesticated later than dogs, and art of them would therefore come later as well, it seems like, at least based on the Cypriot site, something like a modern cat had cultural significance earlier. In fact, this article about it mentions 10,000 year old engravings and pottery, but I can’t find anything else related to that and Google only gives me ancient Egyptian art.
So what else is out there, and what do we know about it? Thank you for your time!
tl;dr: You're up to date on cat facts. At this point it doesn't look likely that we'll find much for cat domestication that's more than about 12,000 years old.
I'm an archaeologist, not an historian, but human-animal studies is my favorite topic. There are so many interwoven parts to the domestication story that will explain why cat art is likely rarer and later than dog.
There is disagreement regarding the definition of domestication. To some, it's when humans change an animal to the point that that animal can no longer function properly without us intervening. Sheep fit this example because of the way we've bred that wool to grow. Some dogs do too (my mom's chiweenie). To others domestication is just when we've changed an animal in any visible way that would benefit us. They get smaller and less toothy. They retain neonatal (cute) facial characteristics.(1) Cows, chickens, and pigs all became slower, nicer, and meatier. Some see this as too "anthropocentric" and prefer to focus on the co-evolutionary results of human-animal relationships. (2) (3)This would be where we think cats start. Humans started storing food, rodents were attracted to that, and cats followed the rodents. (4) Later, people started intentionally keeping them around. They were great for protecting food stores on ships. Even the Vikings had boat-cats. This sea travel is probably what allowed for cats to spread worldwide. (4.5)
All of this is just to say that cats were likely hanging around before efforts to domesticate them. Maybe humans allowed them to stay because they were providing a benefit by preying on pests. Maybe cats were seen as carriers of disease and pests themselves. Maybe a bit of both. And while we can't ever say an archaeological find is definitively the earliest, just the earliest we've found so far, it's likely that cats don't have that social/domestic significance to us until we start becoming more sedentary. Our earlier nomadic lifestyle didn't suit cats.
Most art depicting cats that predates the Cyprus burial is of big cats. The Lascaux Cave site you mentioned has The Cat's Hole and The Alleyway of the Felines estimated around 17,000 years old. (5) (link to pdf with pics)
The Seated Woman of of Çatalhöyük is a figurine around 8,000 years old and features two cats, but they might be lions.
Then there's the Löwenmensch figurine aka Lion Man which is thought to be around 35,000-40,000 years old. I think it's noteworthy here because it's a man with a cat's head. I can't say what message the artist was trying to convey by combining a human and a feline, but it shows that cats were being considered in symbolic ways.
I can't find the specific engravings and pottery mentioned in that article. I looked through some of his published works (a lot is in French, but I know le chat when I see it). I checked the Wikipedia lists for Stone Age Art, Neolithic Art, Upper Paleolithic Art, Lower Paleolithic Art. Can't figure out what he was talking about. I tried a dozen permutations of Neolithic Cat Pottery in Google Scholar. I'll let you know if I ever find it.
As for your search of "something more closely resembling a modern day house cat", well... the wildcat is all but indistinguishable from the domestic cat. The fact that it hasn't gone through the same drastic change as some other domestics makes it really hard to definitively say that remains or art depictions are domestic and not wild. A 200,000 year old wildcat is going to look like that stray tomcat that keeps peeing on my bike tire.
(1) JD Vigne et al., Early taming of the cat in Cyprus, Science, 05/2004
(2) Michael D. Purugganan, What is domestication?, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 05/06/2022
(3) Melinda A. Zeder, Core questions in domestication research, PNAS, 02/20/2015
(4) Magdalena Krajcarz et al., Ancestors of domestic cats in Neolithic Central Europe: Isotopic evidence of a synanthropic diet, PNAS, 07/13/2020
(4.5) Ewen Callaway , How cats conquered the world (and a few Viking ships), Nature, 09/20/2016
(5) Arlette Leroi-Gourhan , The Archaeology of Lascaux Cave, Scientific American, 06/1982