[3][4] For the next decade and a half, he continued to explore the geography and palaeontology of the Pyrenees, uncovering ancestral apes close to the hominid line at Sansan.

Here he revealed the results of his discoveries in the Aurignac cave, demonstrating the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct mammals.

[6] Their conjoint work was immediately to open new horizons, and served to establish a basic stratified typology of Paleolithic man which still holds good today.

The most modest and one of the most illustrious of the founders of modern palaeontology, Lartet's work was publicly recognized by his nomination as an officer of the Légion d'honneur; and in 1848 he had had the offer of a political post.

In 1857 he had been elected a foreign member of the Geological Society of London, and a few weeks before his death he had been made professor of palaeontology at the museum of the Jardin des Plantes.