French geologist, archaeologist, and a principal founder of paleontology, who is chiefly credited with discovering man's earliest art and with establishing a date for the Upper Paleolithic Period of the Stone Age.

A magistrate in the département of Gers, Lartet made his first discovery of fossil remains in 1834 near Auch in southwestern France. Thereafter he devoted much of his time to a systematic excavation of French caves. In 1852, at Aurignac, he found evidence of the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct animals, and in 1860 he discovered a number of early implements at Massat. His “Sur l'ancienneté géologique de l'espèce humaine dans l'Europe occidentale” (1860; “Antiquity of Man in Western Europe”) was followed by New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mamnifers Characteristic of the Last Geological Period (1861).

From 1863, with the support of the English banker-ethnologist Henry Christy, he turned his attention to the Dordogne district and excavated a number of sites well known in the annals of prehistory, including Les Eyzies and La Madeleine, where, in particular, a mammoth bone bearing the engraved figure of an extinct animal was found in an undisturbed Ice Age deposit.

With Christy, Lartet went on to show that the Stone Age comprised successive phases of human culture. They published their researches as Reliquiae Aquitanicae (“Aquitanian Remains”), the first part appearing in 1865, after Christy's death. Publication of this monumental work was completed in 1875 under the title Reliquiae Aquitanicae; Being Contributions to the Archaeology and Palaeontology of Périgord and the Adjoining Provinces of Southern France. From 1869 until his death Lartet was professor of paleontology at the museum of the Jardin des Plantes, Paris.