What is the oldest puppet in the world?
The short answer circulating online is: a mammoth-ivory figure roughly 26,000 years old, found at Brno in today's Czech Republic. The longer answer is more interesting — and forces you to decide what counts as a puppet.
What was actually found
It is a small male figure carved in ivory, attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic, whose notable feature is its construction in separate parts: the limbs were carved individually and show perforations consistent with a movable join. In other words, tens of thousands of years ago, someone deliberately decided that this human figure needed to bend.
Why that does not settle the question
An articulated figure is not automatically a puppet. To deserve the name, strictly speaking, you would have to demonstrate three things: that it was moved intentionally, that someone was watching, and that the movement represented something — a character, an animal, a spirit. From the Brno find we have only the first condition suggested by its construction; the other two leave no archaeological trace.
That is why careful researchers use phrases like "articulated figure" rather than "puppet". The difference is not pedantry: it is the distance between an object and a practice.
The next candidates
Moving down the timeline, the ground firms up. Egyptian wooden figurines with limbs moved by cords appear in funerary and ritual contexts. In the Greek world, the neurospasta — literally "string-pulled" — are mentioned by writers including Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Here we have text: someone describing the object in operation, for an audience that knew what it was.
So how should you answer?
If the question is "what is the oldest articulated object in human form ever found", the Brno figure is a defensible answer. If the question is "what is the oldest record of puppet theatre", the answer shifts to the ancient Mediterranean, and even then only indirectly.
There is a third reading, more interesting than both: the recurrence of the phenomenon. Articulated figures appeared in cultures with no contact, on different continents, in different eras. That suggests making a figure move is not an invention that travelled — it is something people invent, repeatedly, whenever they have material and time. On that long path, see the history of puppetry.