use, some tools have been shown to have served as signifiers of status and group membership. The role of tools for social uses signal cognitive advancements such as complex language and abstract relations to things. Homo sapiens Dates approximate, consult articles for details (From 2,000,000 BC to 2013 AD in (partial) exponential notation) See also: Java Man (−1.75e+06), Yuanmou Man (−1.75e+06: -0.73e+06), Lantian Man (−1.7e+06), Nanjing Man (- 0.6e+06), Tautavel Man (- 0.5e+06), Peking Man (- 0.4e+06), Solo Man (- 0.4e+06), and Peștera cu Oase (- 0.378e+05) Homo sapiens intelligence The eldest findings of Homo sapiens in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco date back years Fossils of Homo sapiens were found in East Africa which are c. 200,000 years old. It is unclear to what extent these early modern humans had developed language, music, religion, etc. According to proponents of the Toba catastrophe theory, the climate in non-tropical regions of the earth experienced a sudden freezing about 70,000 years ago, because of a huge explosion of the Toba volcano that filled the atmosphere with volcanic ash for several years. This reduced the human population to less than 10,000 breeding pairs in equatorial Africa, from which all modern humans are descended. Being unprepared for the sudden change in climate, the survivors were those intelligent enough to invent new tools and ways of keeping warm and finding new sources of food (for example, adapting to ocean fishing based on prior fishing skills used in lakes and streams that became frozen). Around 80,000–100,000 years ago, three main lines of Homo sapiens diverged, bearers of mitochondrial haplogroup L1 (mtDNA) / A (Y-DNA) colonizing Southern Africa (the ancestors of the Khoisan/Capoid peoples), bearers of haplogroup L2 (mtDNA) / B (Y-DNA) settling Central and West Africa (the ancestors of Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan speaking peoples), while the bearers of haplogroup L3 remained in East Africa. The "Great Leap Forward" leading to full behavioral modernity sets in only after this separation. Rapidly increasing sophistication in tool-making and behaviour is apparent from about 80,000 years ago, and the migration out of Africa follows towards the very end of the Middle Paleolithic, some 60,000 years ago. Fully modern behaviour, including figurative art, music, self-ornamentation, trade, burial rites etc. is evident by 30,000 years ago. The oldest unequivocal examples of prehistoric art date to this period, the Aurignacian and the Gravettian periods of prehistoric Europe, such as the Venus figurines and cave painting