Claim: Ancient Cultures inherited Structures and Artefacts from Pre-Historic Lost Civilizations with Advanced Manufacturing Capabilities

Once you've used rock-on-rock to fashion an axe head or a knife or saw, rock-on-wood comes into play.
That was my thinking - followed by wood on wood, to generate fire, once it was observed that intense friction generates heat. So was it sparks from chipping stones, or friction, that was used initially to create fire? Getting OT from ancient technologies producing precision items - not worth another thread, methinks, as it is just speculation.
 
i wonder if it was learned initially from fire making experiments?

It would seem the other way around, maybe as Mendel suggested, but that's just what can be found in the archeological record (bold by me):

Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago (Mya).[1] Evidence for the "microscopic traces of wood ash" as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus, beginning roughly 1 million years ago, has wide scholarly support.[2][3] Some of the earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at the Daughters of Jacob Bridge, Israel, and dated to ~790,000 years ago.[4] At the site, archaeologists also found the oldest likely evidence of controlled use of fire to cook food ~780,000 years ago.[5][6] However, some studies suggest cooking started ~1.8 million years ago.
Content from External Source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

Explore some examples of Early Stone Age tools. The earliest stone toolmaking developed by at least 2.6 million years ago. The Early Stone Age began with the most basic stone implements made by early humans. These Oldowan toolkits include hammerstones, stone cores, and sharp stone flakes. By about 1.76 million years ago, early humans began to make Acheulean handaxes and other large cutting tools.
Content from External Source
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/stone-tools

I know my son worked a bit with a researcher that was trying to push the harnessing of fire further back in time. But it becomes very hard to determine if a bit of charred earth from ~2-3 million years ago is an ancient campfire started by early humans or a naturally occurring fire that was used by early humans or a natural fire that had nothing to do with early humans.

Bottom line, early Homo species were shaping and carving stone as far back as 2.6 million years ago without CAD designs or CNC machines. By the time the early Egyptians were trying to make vases humans had been working stone for millions of years.
 
Convenient video just released by World of Antiquity.

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Here's the agenda. The video itself actually is mainly a compilation of other channels establishing the listed claims. It's just convenient to have so many links and techniques in a single video if you need to find a specific claim. It even uses the exact moment @Ravi screenshotted in post #41. Please note that Dr. Miano links to every video referenced in the video in the description. I'll list out the references made throughout the video to make it easier to follow up on specific claims.

1. Stone tools could carve limestone: CARVING STONES WITH ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY (Mike Haduck) Haduck shows various techniques, all simple and available to the Egyptians. Includes carving right angle and drilling too.
2. Copper tools could carve limestone: Copper chisel against rock | Geologist against myths (Spoiler: copper chisel wins, slowly). This chapter also includes a description of how the Mohs scale is often misused. It is not the right measurement for this subject. Short rundown: Mohs is a relative scale. Rockwell scale is an absolute scale more common in engineering. Paraphrasing Miano here: If you want to know if one material can chip away at another for sculpting, hardness is the wrong measurement; toughness is the correct measure. 2 of the links provided in the description describe toughness and hardness in more detail. Helpful viz here at 13:15. They are correlated, but, for example, note that diamond is the hardest but not the toughest, so it's 1:1.

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3. Iron Tools Could Carve Granite: Starts with a clip of Brien Foerster (who shows on this website a lot) using hardness to say that only "diamond technology" could have cut granite. Miano uses ancient Roman and India as examples of societies that made beautiful structures of granite using iron. But even better, a monastery is being built in Hawaii currently using traditional techniques: Stone Bell Hole Drilling. There is some mention of chiseling, but the main focus is drilling with traditional techniques. At 16:30, there is video of how holes are drilled by a team of two: one with a mallet and the other with a rounded end chisel. They just get in a rhythm and go at it: the process takes about 6-7 hours to drill 18 inches. Every few minutes they remove powdered stone with a wet sponge. Next video in this chapter: The Daily Life of our Temple Carvers Summary of the clips shown: chiseling. Lots of chiseling with simple tools.

4. Stone tools could carve granite: Could granite have been carved before the iron age? The answer is yes. Back to Mike Haduck's video from chapter 1. He demonstrates with various stones, including a primitive hammer he made, that you literally just hit the granite over and over, and it slowly chips away. Miano also states that stone tools were continued to be used even as better technology became available because stone still had some advantages over the new materials. Again, it's a slow process for Haduck but professional Egyptians would have been much faster. He manages to carve a nearly perpendicular hole in the granite at 23:55. He's an amateur at these techniques but was still able to do it! Scientists against Myths, another great youtube channel, have also demonstrated carving granite with flint: How the Ancient Egyptians Cut Granite with Flint | Experiment. Similar results: slow but steady progress. They carved a quite nice looking Egyptian style eye. Linking since it's quite nice looking and a screenshot wouldn't do it justice.
The Race to Bury King Tut by National Geographic is referenced in this section but does not have a youtube video I can link to. Compares steel, bronze, and flint. The flint, as usual, works! (Again, very slowly). For larger portions that don't need precision, the sculptor just bashes away the granite with quartzite chunks and granite powder (I think, I had a little trouble understanding the audio here). Results after 4 weeks of work. Again, quite nice!

5. Stone Abrasives Could Carve Granite: First video is again by Scientists against myths: Ancient Egyptian Granite Sawing Technology: reconstruction. Copper saw combined with an abrasive saws through granite very nicely. Next up: Pyramids Builders: New Clues. Summary: bashing granite with stones mostly. The resulting granite powder can then be used to create abrasives for cutting. In this video, they come up with a method using Nile silt and emery powder to create an abrasive and then use a copper blade to saw the granite. Similar to the other videos, they also flint for precision work. Quoting the video at 34:38: "They managed to make a perfect angle with the tools available in Khufu's era: dolerite balls, a copper blade, abrasive emery paste, and flint.

6. Bonus chapter: Techniques and Hand-Powered Machines: First video (I think already linked somewhere in this thread): Making a Serapeum Box with PRIMITIVE Copper & Stone Tools.What LAHT just won't share with you! by
SGD Sacred Geometry Decoded. Video specifically calls out Foerster for his claims regarding the striations couldn't have been made by primitive tools. Guess what? They can and it's demonstrated in the video. Drilling Cores in Solid Granite using REAL Egyptian Technology: 1 minute video showing the drilling while playing audio from a Joe Rogan episode where of course the guest claims it's impossible. Egypt's Stone Carvers Keep Their Ancestors' Traditions Alive | Still Standing Another example of traditional tools. (This is the video mentioned by @Ravi.) Miano does not here that we are not sure if the techniques used here are the same techniques used in ancient Egypt, but the point is still made that modern equipment is not necessary. Next video, Scientists against Myths again: ANCIENT STONE CRAFT TECHNOLOGY: What Materials Did They Use? Perfect right angle made using flint and some other demonstrations. One of her pieces took 7 months! She will be making a diorite vase using primitive tools next!

Almost all of these videos are amateurs in ancient Egyptian techniques but they still manage to make very impressive carvings!

So, to summarize, how did the ancients build their megalithic structures?
Patiently
 
Convenient video just released by World of Antiquity.

Nice find Yoshy and well done on the breakdown. Ultimately all we can do is share counter examples to the claims of Uncharted X, Chris Dunn and the rest of the "Ancient Technology" crowd. The entirety of their claim is built on circumstantial evidence at best. None of them, to my knowledge, has ever produce a single piece of actual evidence of all this high tech. They merely say these things could not have been made by hand with ancient tools and then ignore all counter examples. I guess it keeps the income streams flowing. They ultimately appeal to people that enjoy or need the idea of a mystery.
 
I really don't want to watch 36 minutes of video, what are the main points?
New evidence suggests that ancient civilizations may have used forms of computers and sophisticated machining processes in deep antiquity. This is based on the analysis of an ancient Egyptian pre-dynastic granite vase, which has revealed a mathematical and geometric system used in its design, as well as the algorithms that define it. The analysis was conducted by Mark and a colleague from the https://unsigned.io website, who reverse-engineered the vase to create a CAD model that conforms to the actual artifact with microscopic levels of precision. This challenges our current understanding of the history and capabilities of ancient civilizations on Earth.
 
New evidence suggests that ancient civilizations may have used forms of computers and sophisticated machining processes in deep antiquity. This is based on the analysis of an ancient Egyptian pre-dynastic granite vase, which has revealed a mathematical and geometric system used in its design, as well as the algorithms that define it. The analysis was conducted by Mark and a colleague from the https://unsigned.io website, who reverse-engineered the vase to create a CAD model that conforms to the actual artifact with microscopic levels of precision. This challenges our current understanding of the history and capabilities of ancient civilizations on Earth.
In other words, the thing we have been debunking for seven pages so far.
 
Additional analysis of 5,000+ year old granite jar suggest use of Turing machine.

Bill, do you mean a turning machine?
Because it certainly doesn't require a Turing machine.
True Turing machines don't exist- by definition, they require an infinite memory.
They are an abstraction, used to inform models of computation.

That said, the Turing machine is an amazingly elegant work of genius.

If anyone says that the manufacture of an existing artefact required the use of a Turing machine, it is clear that they don't know what a Turing machine is.
This isn't a contentious point.
 
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Because it certainly doesn't require a Turing machine.
True Turing machines don't exist- by definition, they require an infinite memory.
They are an abstraction, used to inform models of computation.
Their intent is to say that it requires a computer, without committing to a technology.

Article:
In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.
 
New evidence suggests that ancient civilizations may have used forms of computers and sophisticated machining processes in deep antiquity.
How is this "new evidence" different from the claims we've been discussing here? What is it?

What exactly is the "additional analysis" that they did? What did they add on top of their initial analysis?
 
What they have proven is that they could make a copy of the object using modern methods, if they wanted to.
That does not prove that the original object was made using modern methods.

Just suppose that an ancient craftsman was making that object and it was almost complete, what force would prevent him from making the final changes that led to its exact shape? Would his hands suddenly be unable to touch the object? Would its surface suddenly become impregnable, so he can no longer make any alterations? For them to prove it was made using modern methods they would have to prove that it is almost impossible for it to have been made by hand. And that a skilled craftsman with a good eye could not have made it.

What they have discovered is a combination of mathematical statements that accurately describe the shape of the object. Given enough time you can do that for any shape, but all you are doing is describing the object.
 
Bill, do you mean a turning machine?
Because it certainly doesn't require a Turing machine.
True Turing machines don't exist- by definition, they require an infinite memory.
They are an abstraction, used to inform models of computation.

That said, the Turing machine is an amazingly elegant work of genius.

If anyone says that the manufacture of an existing artefact required the use of a Turing machine, it is clear that they don't know what a Turing machine is.
This isn't a contentious point.
"Turing" machine as in a computer, their language not mine. As I understand it, the measurements of the vessel are such that it could not have been made without a computer to guide the subtraction process. The vessel could not have been made by chance and could not have been carved by hand.
 
What they have proven is that they could make a copy of the object using modern methods, if they wanted to.
That does not prove that the original object was made using modern methods.

Just suppose that an ancient craftsman was making that object and it was almost complete, what force would prevent him from making the final changes that led to its exact shape? Would his hands suddenly be unable to touch the object? Would its surface suddenly become impregnable, so he can no longer make any alterations? For them to prove it was made using modern methods they would have to prove that it is almost impossible for it to have been made by hand. And that a skilled craftsman with a good eye could not have made it.

What they have discovered is a combination of mathematical statements that accurately describe the shape of the object. Given enough time you can do that for any shape, but all you are doing is describing the object.
They describe the math used to create the object. They created a CAD model using only the math and compared the CAD measurements to the object. The precision is within a few thousandths of a millimeter. The math is shown in the video for those that can understand it.
 
Their intent is to say that it requires a computer, without committing to a technology.

Article:
In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.

Could an analogue computer have been enough? How many fourier coefficients are needed to model an object that falls into the same entropic class as this object. We don't know they were trying to create exactly this, they could have been trying to create something mostly like this, but what they ended up with was this. (This seems to be a common fallacy - does it have a name? It seems related to what I used to call "scare precision", where numbers are specified to way more decimal places than were meaningful.)
 
I really don't want to watch 36 minutes of video, what are the main points?

You don't need to watch more than 341s of it.

You can stop as soon as you get to (hand transcribed, E&OE):
If you think about our maths today, we use a base 10 system, you know base 16 is hexadecimal, but we generally use, like, base 10. These guys probably using a version of mathematics that's more like base radian or base pi.
Content from External Source
Technically, you can give meaning to "base pi", but it would have *no practical use at all*. Unlike base phi, which is quite pretty, but that's because it's algebraic - there's no need to limit yourself to integer bases, or even positive ones, or even real ones, *if* you're sufficiently mathematically sophisticated. But he clearly isn't. I can tell that because "base radian" is pure word salad.

It seems that the fact that ratios are definitionally important in positional number systems ("bases"), has made him think that any use of a ratio must be something to do with positional number systems. The old "water is used to make beer, this contains water, therefore this is beer" syllogistic fallacy.

As you mentioned in a previous post, it's not unlikely (that's litotes, it's basically a certainty) that they are familiar with the ratio between a diameter and a circumference, a ratio that they can physically construct using the advanced analog computer known as "a piece of string". I didn't watch any further in the video, so I've not seen how this magical "piece of string" computer may have been utilised. I'm sure it would impress me (that's sarcasm, it wouldn't).
 
Could an analogue computer have been enough? How many fourier coefficients are needed to model an object that falls into the same entropic class as this object. We don't know they were trying to create exactly this, they could have been trying to create something mostly like this, but what they ended up with was this. (This seems to be a common fallacy - does it have a name? It seems related to what I used to call "scare precision", where numbers are specified to way more decimal places than were meaningful.)
All good questions, I'm sure. I don't know the answers but this is the first and only object analyzed thus far. There are thousands of them but the Egyptian authorities won't allow them to be studied. I wonder if Metabunk has anyone on staff familiar with 5 axis milling?
 
You don't need to watch more than 341s of it.

You can stop as soon as you get to (hand transcribed, E&OE):
If you think about our maths today, we use a base 10 system, you know base 16 is hexadecimal, but we generally use, like, base 10. These guys probably using a version of mathematics that's more like base radian or base pi.
Content from External Source
Technically, you can give meaning to "base pi", but it would have *no practical use at all*. Unlike base phi, which is quite pretty, but that's because it's algebraic - there's no need to limit yourself to integer bases, or even positive ones, or even real ones, *if* you're sufficiently mathematically sophisticated. But he clearly isn't. I can tell that because "base radian" is pure word salad.

It seems that the fact that ratios are definitionally important in positional number systems ("bases"), has made him think that any use of a ratio must be something to do with positional number systems. The old "water is used to make beer, this contains water, therefore this is beer" syllogistic fallacy.

As you mentioned in a previous post, it's not unlikely (that's litotes, it's basically a certainty) that they are familiar with the ratio between a diameter and a circumference, a ratio that they can physically construct using the advanced analog computer known as "a piece of string". I didn't watch any further in the video, so I've not seen how this magical "piece of string" computer may have been utilised. I'm sure it would impress me (that's sarcasm, it wouldn't).
Thanks for your opinion. Unfortunately, I am not a mathematician. The person doing the analysis is.
 
My teeth start to itch when I read that. I refer back to the old infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters saw. Unlikely things happen if you have enough attempts.
Granite is a 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness, diamond is a 10, The granite would have had to have been carved with something harder than it is.
Granite is mostly quartz and feldspar. The hardest of those is quartz. The sand of the desert is mostly quartz. Not a problem.
 
When you say they were wrong on that point too, what else are they wrong about specifically?
That it couldn't be done by hand, that the "deep tool impressions" can't be a result from older techniques, etc etc.
But all of this has already been shown earlier in this topic, have you ignored all that?
 
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Granite is a 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness, diamond is a 10, The granite would have had to have been carved with something harder than it is.
Please read section 2 in my post #243 and then watch the corresponding time in the video. Mohs and hardness aren't even the right measurements to use.
 
Technically, you can give meaning to "base pi", but it would have *no practical use at all*. Unlike base phi, which is quite pretty, but that's because it's algebraic - there's no need to limit yourself to integer bases, or even positive ones, or even real ones, *if* you're sufficiently mathematically sophisticated. But he clearly isn't. I can tell that because "base radian" is pure word salad
sounds like someone trying to bluff their way into "can't explain, therefore alien". No actual mathematician (or engineer) could have signed off on this and stayed true to their training. This is a "the moon is made of cheese" level mistake.
 
doesn't need to be "small and hard", I've used chalk to fix bicycle wheels when they had a whack

anything that leaves a mark will do
But we are talking about granite and centuries before the potter's wheel. A simple lathe cannot reproduce the geometry to within a few thousands of a millimeter, consistently throughout the piece even the inside. The point made in the Unchartedx video is that high speed rotary tools guided by some kind of computing mechanism would have been required. A modern example of 5 axis milling machines are popular on youtube and they move and look sort of robotic. Thank you.
 
The vase that was tested is in a private collection. Egyptian authorities won't allow testing but many of these artifacts are in private hands. These artifacts number in the thousands and were found buried under the step pyramid.
Bill, I have just watched a video from the "Scientists against myths" YouTube channel, which emphasizes one aspect that has perhaps not got the amount of attention it should have in this discussion. It's on the core sample that has been held up as an example by the "ancient technology" guys. This video talked less about the methods that might be used to create such a thing, and more about the claims that were made for it, essentially asking "Are the claims true?" They got a highly detailed image of the core from the museum to examine. The answer was, perhaps not surprisingly, that no, they are definitely not true, despite what claims Flinders Petrie made in the past and UnchartedX, Christopher Dunn and others are making in the present. And as we have mentioned before, if a claim is incorrect, there is no need to explain it.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQi4yql7Ysg
 
As it says in the video, anyone can reproduce or verify the results for themselves and present their manufacturing process that achieves the same precise geometry. I look forward to seeing the results on the next one. Thank you.
 
"Turing" machine as in a computer, their language not mine.
Yes, I get that. But why use that inaccurate phrasing? Why not say "programable computer"?
Their intent is to say that it requires a computer, without committing to a technology.

Article: In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.
You're right, Mendel, and I have heard PCs referred to as Turing machines- but they're not, they're finite state machines.
(In fairness, I guess that could be argued as being a matter of semantics- but I feel that the guys in the video are using specific terms to give an air of expertise).


The video Bill Ferguson shared goes on about circles, geometry, "sacred geometry" etc.
But even the examples given by the guys in the video look a lot less than "perfect" if you look closer.
This is a screengrab taken at 13:04 into the video, which I've enlarged.
jug handle.JPG

The appearance of complexity or precision does not mean that computers have been involved.
All the following were developed and/ or constructed without digital computers. It's obviously a pretty arbitrary list;
but I'd guess all examples required greater planning and/ or precision of manufacture, or have greater organizational complexity, than the vase in the video.

Examples of miniaturisation/ precision:
miniaturisation.jpg
Technologies:
technology.jpg

Civil engineering / architecture:
civil engineering.jpg

Science concepts and discoveries:
acc.jpg


All these things existed before, or were developed without the use of, digital computers.
The surface of the vase in the video may have been finished to a very low tolerance, but it doesn't require the use of a computer.

I think there's an awful lot of evidence that the ancient Egyptians were very gifted stonemasons.
The constant "findings" and claims that items from the ancient Egyptian culture(s) were in fact made by other cultures seem odd to me. I don't know if it's significant that similar claims aren't often made about European cultural artefacts.
 
They aren't particularly good at describing what they're measuring, a few diagrams would have helped disambiguate (as I mentioned before, if a sentence like "an ellipsoid isn't a geometric shape", or whatever it is he said, can be uttered, then mere words are failing as a communication mechanism - I think he may have meant "an ellipsoid isn't a primitive in the modelling package we've used to model the shape", which might well be true, but even that would be odd).

They address the flatness of the top surface, and its circularity first, and treat that as a plane of reference, I think they are taking cross sections down the object, and calculating the circularity of each slice, and how much its best-fit centre deviates from the perpendicular from the centre of the top surface. A turned object will obviously have minimal deviation, because the axis from which the measurement are taken will be the axis around which the object is rotated. However, low deviation is not sufficient to prove the object was turned. Their largest deviation was I think the off-centreness of some of the slices - that might be an argument against turning, I can't picture in my head whether that numerically large deviation measured in minuscule units is actually small or large.

Aside: When was turning invented? I genuinely don't know. I'm sure I've seen fire-starting drills from ancient tribes that are based on a spun spindle - the ancient egyptians surely should have had access to spindles for mounting pieces? I'd assert that you don't need high speed rotation to achieve the results they have in their hand - you just need a stable enough mount upon which you can manually rotate the piece (thus the handles are not the problem they think they are). Also, what range of abrasives did they have access to - the secret to getting close to perfection when grinding something down is to have a wide range of grits, and of course lots of patience - you don't move on to a finer grit until you've perfectly happy your object has no flaws on the scale of your current grit or larger; if you have to return to a stage, you have to do all of the subsequent ones again. (My "toothpaste" earlier was an exageration - I had Brasso and sometimes jewellers' rouge as finer abbrasives, and a wide range of wet-and-dry paper as courser ones. Toothpaste was merely the "goes from rough to shiny" phase.)

I'm not casting the experts off as being wrong in the technical things they said - they rightly say that data is data, and data, if measured competently - again which I have zero reason to doubt, does not lie. At least one of them clearly knows and cares enough about what he's doing that he instinctively immediately corrected his colleague's "2" to "3" early on when discussing the flatness of the top and how many stones are needed to achieve a known flat grinding surface. It's the interpretation of the data, and the estimation of the ancient capabilities that I consider misguided. However, again in their favour - they are inviting the world to prove them wrong, like good scientists do. I'm not sure how many craftsmen would be willing to donate a few thousand hours of their time for this goal - it's likely not very many. Maybe some crowdfunding would help grease the process?

Anyone know the precision with which the earliest telescope lenses/mirrors were manufactured? I'm just trying to get a mental image of the scales involved for precision manufacture over the aeons.
Turning was invented in the 1,800's as I understand it. An odd thing about these artifacts is that everyone agrees they are pre-dynastic and 5,000 years old but instead of making advancements in technology, as one would expect, the precision was lost. The bulk of these vases were discovered hidden under the step pyramid just in the past 100 years or so, I believe. There are videos on YouTube that show pieces and shards still there today. One piece exist that shows signs of turning. In the base of a broken vase you can see from the mark left in the base that it was being turned off-center. The turn was stopped, the piece adjusted and then re-turned, carving a distinctly different circular pattern in the base. The guys doing the analysis are just nerds who have been trying to measure these things for years. I look forward to the next one they scan. Thank you.
 
Turning was invented in the 1,800's as I understand it. An odd thing about these artifacts is that everyone agrees they are pre-dynastic and 5,000 years old but instead of making advancements in technology, as one would expect, the precision was lost. The bulk of these vases were discovered hidden under the step pyramid just in the past 100 years or so, I believe. There are videos on YouTube that show pieces and shards still there today. One piece exist that shows signs of turning. In the base of a broken vase you can see from the mark left in the base that it was being turned off-center. The turn was stopped, the piece adjusted and then re-turned, carving a distinctly different circular pattern in the base. The guys doing the analysis are just nerds who have been trying to measure these things for years. I look forward to the next one they scan. Thank you.

According to Wikipedia the earliest evidence for the lathe is from Egypt, circa 1300 BC. Mycenaean Greece about the same time, Etruscan's 6th Century BC, China about 400 BC. Wonderful resource Wikipedia.
 
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