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. Cultural remains included flints and bone carvings. 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 Palaeolithic mobiliary art.  An English translation of the first part of this paper 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.