[2] In recognition of its significance for various scientific fields and the 19th-century pioneering work of Édouard Lartet the Cave of Aurignac was officially declared a national Historic Monument of France by order of May 26, 1921.

[4] In 1852, several years before the advent of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline, local worker Jean Baptist Bonnemaison searched the embankment and the platform in front of the cave out of curiosity, where he found some prehistoric tools.

[7] At the very base in a thick black layer that contained large quantities of ash and charcoal, he unearthed characteristic sharpened flint tools and worked bones and antlers.

Lartet concluded in his 1861 publication New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period, that these local early humans must have been contemporaries of the extinct animal species.

A method, that proved to be not popular and Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet's more serviceable system of Paleolithic chronology based on the evolution of human tool sets, was widely accepted during the following decades.