Edouard Lartet. Portrait of Edouard Armand Isidore Lartet (1801-71), early French palaeontologist and discoverer of Cro-Magnon man. Lartet studied law but became interested in fossils and discovered two early primates: Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus. In 1863 he uncovered evidence that man had been living in Europe during the Ice Age after finding an ivory carving of a woolly mammoth. At Cro- Magnon in the Dordogne he found fossilized skeletons of Cro-Magnon man, the ancestor of modern man.