First published account of the discovery of the first anthropomorphic fossil ape. Lartet's discovery, made in 1836 at Sansan, was the first to challenge Cuvier’s assertion that both humans and apes were products of the present geological epoch; it opened Lartet’s mind to the possibility of discovering “antediluvian” human remains. The fossil was named Pithecus Antiquus by de Blainville in 1840 and later placed in the new genus Pliopithecus by Paul Gervais.

In this lengthy paper of nearly 80 pages Lartet proposed “the first chronological framework into which both human skeletal and cultural remains could be fitted, based on fossil animal bones recovered from French cave sites” (Spencer 1997, 606). Cultural remains included flints and bone carvings. The first figure in plate 10 shows Lartet’s original concept of how the human skeletons in the Aurignac had been arranged in the chamber; he subsequently altered his opinion based on discoveries made in 1862. In the final plate of this paper Lartet published an illustration of two deer carved on a reindeer bone which had been found between 1834 and 1845 by Pierre-Amédée Brouillet in the cave of Chauffaud in the Vienne. Brouillet and others had thought the engraving to be Celtic, but Lartet declared it be much earlier; his appreciation of the significance and true date of the finds from Chaffaud, Aurignac and Massat was “the first clear statement of what we now call Franco-Cantabrian Upper Palaeolithic art.” (Daniel 1981, 62). An English translation of the first part of this paper, including a reproduction of Lartet’s reconstruction of the burial chamber, was published as "New researches respecting the co-existence of man with the great fossil mammals, regarded as characteristic of the latest geological period," The Natural History Review, 2, no. 5 (January 1862) 53–71.

In 1863 Lartet and Christy began systematically examining the caves in the Périgord (Dordogne) region of France. This study of mobiliary or portable art, such as carved stones, carved ivory, carved bones, or carved reindeer antlers, is the founding work on Upper Paleolithic art, and one of the earliest publications to illustrate Paleolithic art. Digital facsimile of the separate offprint from Google Books at this link.

This beautiful and bibliographically complicated work was issued in 17 parts from 1865 to 1875. It includes 82 tinted lithographic plates, and is the first visually spectacular large extensively illustrated publication on paleoanthropology and paleolithic mobiliary art. Plate B-XXVIII illustrates the ivory carving of a mammoth discovered in 1864 by Lartet, Falconer, and de Verneuil in the cave of La Madeleine, which provided undeniable evidence that humans and mammoths had co-existed. Lartet first described this carving in a paper entitled “Une lame d’ivoire fossile trouvée dans un gisement ossifere du Périgord, et portant des incisions qui paraissent constituer la reproduction d’un éléphant à longue crinere,” published in the Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences 61 (1865): 309–11; an English translation of this brief paper appears in the Reliquiae Aquitanicae. The work also includes the English translation of the first paper on Cro-Magnon man by Edouard Lartet's son, Louis Lartet: Mémoire sur une sépulture des anciens troglodytes du Périgord, Annales des sciences naturelles, 5e sér., zoologie et paléontologie, 10, 133-145, 1868.