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Aniconism and the origins of palaeoart

Robert G. Bednarik

To cite this article: Robert G. Bednarik (2017): Aniconism and the origins of palaeoart, Religion,
DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2017.1288785

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RELIGION, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2017.1288785

Aniconism and the origins of palaeoart*

Robert G. Bednarik
International Federation of Rock Art Organisations (IFRAO), Caulfield South, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Contrary to the widely held belief that iconic palaeoart precedes Aniconism; human evolution;
aniconic during the early history of humans, palaeoart palaeoart; Pleistocene;
commenced as non-iconic forms, and in most parts of the world iconicity; pareidolia
then settled by hominins continued as such during the
Pleistocene. The forms, development and global distribution of
such palaeoart are presented within the framework of hominin
evolution. Attention is given to the question of the continuation
of aniconism after the introduction of iconicity and the apparent
connection between the latter and youth. This coincides with the
role of aniconism in the world of specific ethnographically studied
peoples, such as the Aborigines of Australia and the Jarawas of
the Andamans. The neuroscientific explanation of aniconism
shows that it is cognitively more complex than iconic depiction.
Based on these and other strands of evidence, a general
hypothesis of the roles and significance of aniconism in the
world’s pre-literate societies, be they extant or extinct, is developed.

Introduction
The notion that humans first evolved in Europe – or to be quite specific, in England –
which dominated the discussion of the topic during the first half of the 20th century,
was destroyed by the realisation that the discipline had been hoodwinked by the Piltdown
hoax1 (Weiner, Oakley, and Le Gros Clark 1953; Thackeray 1992; Gardiner 2003). Since
then, the focus of palaeoanthropology has shifted to eastern and southern Africa. But the
equally preposterous notion that palaeoart production commenced in the caves of France
and Spain still remains at the core of Eurocentric beliefs about cultural primacy. It deter-
mines today’s beliefs of archaeology of how human modernity arose in a small western
appendage of Asia, far from the main centres of human evolution and cultural develop-
ment. These convictions find support in various false beliefs and their tangible manifes-
tations. For instance there are many dozens of Pleistocene rock art sites in Europe on
UNESCO’s World Heritage List, but there is not a single one from the remaining conti-
nents. And yet, Pleistocene rock art is not only much more common in the rest of the
world; some of it is very significantly older than the earliest known in Europe. Not only

CONTACT Robert G. Bednarik [email protected]

*
The research this paper is based on has been funded entirely by the author. The images are his own and can be published
in monochrome version in the printed copy.
1
The essence of the Piltdown hoax is that it implied that humans initially evolved in England, misleading the discipline for
four decades.
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 R. G. BEDNARIK

does it need to be asked why so much attention is given to the cave art of the period
archaeologists call ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ (a better term would be ‘Mode 4 technocomplex’;2
Foley and Lahr 1997); if there is much older palaeoart elsewhere, the idea that ‘culture’ or
‘symbolic production’ began in Europe evaporates at once (Bednarik 2011a, 2012, 2013a).
This idea is thought to derive much support from yet another major falsity in archae-
ology: the hypothesis that an African species of ‘anatomically modern humans’ that were
unable to interbreed with the resident robust hominins of Europe invaded that continent
at some unspecified time, roughly between 40 000 and 30 000 years ago. The ‘African Eve’
scenario accounts for human modernity by postulating the complete replacement of all
‘pre-modern’ hominins, first in Africa, then in Asia and finally in Europe. It explains
the advent of the cave art as marking the appearance of Eve’s progeny in southwestern
Europe, despite the complete absence of such evidence from along the trail Eve’s descen-
dants are likely to have taken, for example, in Africa, through the Levant and Turkey or the
Russian plains. The Eve theory derives from another archaeological hoax (Bednarik 2008a,
2013a), in which a German professor disseminated numerous false radiocarbon datings of
many human remains (Protsch 1973, 1975) and proposed that modern humans originate
in sub-Saharan Africa (Terberger and Street 2003; Schulz 2004). It has prompted several
derivative models, including the ‘Afro-European sapiens’ model (Bräuer 1984), followed
by the complete replacement scenario (Cann, Stoneking, and Wilson 1987; Stringer and
Andrews 1988), the ‘wave theory’ (Eswaran 2002) and the ‘assimilation theory’ (Smith,
Janković, and Karavanić 2005).
These hypotheses ignore the substantial evidence that in many parts of Eurasia, from
Spain to Siberia, the Upper Palaeolithic could not have been introduced from Africa,
because it emerges gradually from the preceding Middle Palaeolithic technologies in
numerous centres tens of thousands of years before it first appears in the Middle East
or anywhere in northern Africa (Camps and Chauhan 2009). Indeed, evidence of
‘modern behaviour’3 (Bednarik 2012) emerges even in Australia before it does in northern
Africa. The genetic evidence suggests that modern Europeans, Asians and Papuans are not
closely related to Africans, but possess Neanderthal genes (Green et al. 2010). Generally,
humans 10 ka (10 000 years) ago were about 10% more robust than today, 20 ka back they
were 20% more robust and so on; there is no sudden physiological change at any point in
time. All human fossils across Eurasia from the window of about 40–28 ka ago are either
robust (Neanderthaloid) or intermediate between robust and gracile forms. In other
words, the change from robust to gracile humans was gradual, and followed a mosaic
pattern: in regions such as Spain, the Levant, Siberia, China and Australia, robust and
gracile types coexisted, and in all such cases they used similar tools, even similar orna-
ments. Therefore the two forms cannot be reliably identified by their tools: both groups
used Mode 3 and Mode 4 technologies (Table 1). The notions of the African Eve suppor-
ters that a people of superior intellect, cognition and technology invaded Eurasia are
entirely without substance.

2
The archaeological divisions of early human culture, established 150 years ago, are superseded; they were largely based on
perceived tool types, although tools do not identify cultures. The ‘Palaeolithic’ has been more appropriately divided into
four technocomplexes, Modes 1–4.
3
Or what archaeologists routinely regard as such: for example, blade production, bone tools, ‘art’ production, language,
seafaring, ochre use and forward planning.
 RELIGION 3

Table 1. The main divisions of Pleistocene technocomplexes.

Traditional designations
Eurasia, N-Africa Southern Africa Technocomplexes Dominant featuresa Rough timingb
Upper Palaeolithic Later Stone Age Mode 4 Blades, bone tools 11–40 ka
Middle Palaeolithic Middle Stone Age Mode 3 Prepared core technology 40–300 ka
Lower Palaeolithic Earlier Stone Age Mode 2 Handaxes, cleavers 300 ka–1.6 Ma
Mode 1 Handaxe free 1.6–3.3 Ma
a
These features are only a rough guide; actual discrimination is much more complex.
b
These estimates differ considerably between regions and are only provided as rough guides.

About palaeoart
Most important in the present context is that art-like productions (i.e., features that in
extant societies would be defined as art by Westerners, which in ancient contexts consti-
tute ‘palaeoart’) can be attributed to both Mode 4 (‘Upper Palaeolithic’) and Mode 3
(‘Middle Palaeolithic’) technocomplexes. Indeed, there are even rare instances of palaeoart
from the preceding Modes 2 and 1 ‘cultures’ (‘Lower Palaeolithic’), although these have so
far been limited to India and South Africa. While this is another of the many forms of evi-
dence against the replacement theory, it also needs to be emphasised that we have no jus-
tification to claim that art-like production of the Pleistocene constitutes ‘art’, in the
contemporary sense of that term. The term ‘art’ always derives from an ethnocentric
concept: ‘the status of an artifact as a work of art results from the ideas a culture
applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpret-
ation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood’ (Danto
1988). It would be preposterous to contend that modern (e.g., Westernised) humans could
fathom the ideas past cultures applied to paleoart tens or hundreds of millennia ago. They
cannot even establish the status of recent ethnographic works with any objective under-
standing (Dutton 1993): interpretation is inseparable from the art work (Danto 1986).
To regard paleoart as art is therefore an application of an etic and ethnocentric idea to
products of societies about whose emic parameters nothing is known in most cases
(‘emic’ refers to knowledge about and interpretation of a culture by a participant; ‘etic’
refers to interpretation by a member of another culture, including a ‘researcher’).
That is why this material is preferably defined as ‘palaeoart’, a term generically referring
to art-like productions of the distant past. It cannot even be established whether palaeoart
had a symbolic function. Perhaps it did, but the common assumption that this has to be
the case needs to be demonstrated and not just presumed, bearing in mind that ethno-
graphic evidence tends to point to more complex interpretations. What can be said
unequivocally is that all palaeoart functioned as exograms (Bednarik 2014a), which are
externalised memory traces. It was the concept of the engram that spawned the idea of
storage of memory traces external to the brain, first proposed by Gregory (1970, 148).
The notion of such a ‘surrogate cortex’ was then developed by Goody (1977), Bednarik
(1987) and Carruthers (1990, 1998). Bednarik’s proposal identified certain phenomena
as engram-like, externalised, ‘permanent’ forms to which the human intellect of the
creator as well as conspecifics could refer. It led to Donald’s (1991, 2001) coining of the
neologism ‘exogram’ to define the concept. Donald’s ideas were marred by his reliance
on the replacement hypothesis and his lack of familiarity with pre-modern exograms
(Bednarik 2014a), and they were severely criticised (e.g., Brace 1993, 1996, 1999; Cynx
4 R. G. BEDNARIK

and Clark 1993; Adams and Aizawa 2001). Exograms are semi-permanent, unconstrained
and reformatable, can be of any medium, have virtually unlimited information capacity
and size, and can be subjected to unlimited iterative refinement. It is the consistent and
skilled use of exograms that most separates humans from other animals and that provides
the clearest indicator of essentially modern behaviour. All palaeoart consists of exograms,
presenting the earliest surviving evidence of them. Their burgeoning incidence from the
final Pleistocene record implies that competence in employing and exploiting exograms
had by that time become the primary selecting factor in maximising cognitive fitness,
gradually replacing traditional, ‘natural’ selection criteria in humans. Exograms generate
not only frames of reference; more importantly they also create self-referential realities4
(Bednarik 2014a).
Palaeoart evidence includes petroglyphs (rock engravings, poundings, peckings and
finger flutings), pictograms (rock paintings, stencils, drawings and beeswax figures), por-
table engravings and paintings, figurines/proto-figurines, beads and pendants, pigment
use and manuports (items collected by hominins for their outstanding visual qualities,
such as crystals, fossil casts, dendrites and stones of iconic properties). There is no hard
and fast separation possible between iconic and aniconic forms of palaeoart, because ico-
nicity is likely to be perceived differently by societies of the distant past. The brains of
modern people, such as Westerners, are significantly different from those who created
palaeoart, in structure, organisation and connectedness (Helvenston 2013). In the
present context the descriptions ‘iconic’ and ‘aniconic’ refer to the dominant perception
of Westerners, but even here a sharp division is impossible, as shown by pareidolia (Bed-
narik 2017). In pareidolia, which is an integral element in the operation of the visual
system, iconography can be detected in objects that are not iconic at all, such as the
exterior of a house or a piece of toast on which a face is detected (Bednarik 2017).

The origins of palaeoart

It seems widely believed that ‘prehistoric art’ began with the cave art primarily of France
and Spain. This corpus is perceived as being dominated by semi-naturalistic zoomorphs,
which is a second misconception. The animal images are greatly outnumbered by other
types of motifs, most of which seem aniconic and which include the so-called signs
(Figure 1). These are simple geometric patterns that are frequently repeated, and may
or may not have iconographic referents. These Franco-Cantabrian traditions originate
about 40 000 years ago and some authors have suggested that they were begun by Nean-
derthaloid rather than fully gracile people (Bednarik 2007, 2008a, 2011a, 2011b; Sadier
et al. 2012). This may also apply to portable palaeoart objects. Certainly those of the Châ-
telperronian technocomplex are the work of Neanderthals, but those of other early Upper
Palaeolithic ‘cultures’, such as the Aurignacian, may also be creations of robust Homo
sapiens.
Be that as it may, the Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic certainly also produced
palaeoart, for instance at La Ferrassie (France; Peyrony 1934) (Figure 2), La Roche-Cotard
(France; Marquet et al. 2014), Zarzamorza Cave (Spain) or Gorham’s Cave (Gibraltar;
Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014), and apparently at many further sites. So did their robust
4
Such as the reality any human perceives himself/herself to exist in.
 RELIGION 5

Figure 1. The dominant motifs in the Upper Palaeolithic Franco-Cantabrian cave art are the so-called
signs, apparently aniconic (adapted from Leroi-Gourhan).

contemporaries in other continents. In Australia, a massive corpus of palaeoart of the

Pleistocene and the first half of the Holocene is by people with Mode 3 technologies
(akin to a Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia or a Middle Stone Age in sub-Saharan Africa;
see Table 1). In Tasmania, the Mode 3 traditions continued right up to British settlement,
that is, just 200 years ago, therefore all of the rock art of that island must be essentially
Middle Palaeolithic. Africa’s Middle Stone Age has also produced a catalogue of palaeoart
(Bednarik 2013b). But what comes as a surprise to anyone believing ‘art’ began in the caves
of France and Spain is that even vastly earlier Lower Palaeolithic palaeoart has also been
reported. Some of the cupules of two Kalahari sites, Nchwaneng and Potholes Hoek in
South Africa, have been attributed to the Fauresmith tool tradition, which straddles the
Lower and Middle Stone Ages (or Modes 2 and 3 technocomplexes) (Figure 3). They
have been estimated to be 400 000–410 000 years old (Beaumont and Bednarik 2015).
6 R. G. BEDNARIK

Figure 2. The sepulchral block from a Neanderthal child’s grave in La Ferrassie (possibly in the order of
50 000 years old, oldest known rock art in Europe), bearing 18 cupules, 16 of them arranged in pairs.

The cupules and linear petroglyphs of two central Indian sites are thought to be much
older still. They were found in two quartzite caves, Auditorium Cave at Bhimbetka (Bed-
narik 1993) and Daraki-Chattan (Bednarik et al. 2005), and in both cases belong to a stone
tool tradition of Mode 1 – the earliest phase of human tool production identified.
Still older is the jaspilite cobble from Makapansgat Cave in the north of South Africa, a
manuport that has been carried a great distance and deposited in the dolomite cave
between 2.5 and 3 million years ago (Dart 1974; Bednarik 1998). It was found with numer-
ous remains of australopithecines but may have been curated by some of the earliest
members of Homo. The smooth red stone has distinctive natural markings that cause it
to resemble a primate’s head. It is entirely unmodified but its pareidolic properties were
apparently detected, which presupposes apperceptive capability on the part of the individ-
ual collecting it. Another class of palaeoart that has yielded Lower Palaeolithic specimens
is that of proto-figurines, that is, stones that naturally resemble humans but have been
modified to emphasise that semblance even more. One such figure was excavated at Bere-
khat Ram in Israel (Goren-Inbar 1986), another at Tan-Tan in Morocco (Bednarik 2003a).
Beads of the same period come from sites in France, Austria, Israel and Libya (Bednarik
2005). Portable engravings have been reported from the Lower Palaeolithic or Early Stone

Figure 3. Cupules at Nchwaneng, Kalahari Desert, South Africa, thought to be about 410 000 years old.
 RELIGION 7

Age of Germany (Figure 4), Bulgaria, China and South Africa (Bednarik 2013b, 2013c,
2014b). The history of pigment use, especially of haematite and other iron minerals,
begins about one million years ago, at such sites as Kathu Pan 1 and Wonderwerk
Cave, both in South Africa (Bednarik 2013b).

Aniconic palaeoart of the Pleistocene

It follows that some form of palaeoart production has apparently occurred for most of the
entire duration of the genus Homo – and not just since the advent of the Upper Palaeo-
lithic in Eurasia, as the African Eve advocates claim. In terms of what might be subsumed
under graphic art, the Mode 1 or 2 traditions have so far only contributed engraved sets of
line patterns that may be subparallel or splayed (apparently anticipating the convergent
lines motif, as it is called), dot patterns in the form of cupules and a few deeply
pounded line motifs. The subsequent Mode 3 traditions display a more diverse selection
of motif types. In South Africa, Europe and Australia there is a distinctive preference of
circular motifs, which in Australia was developed into a complex tradition of circles
and circulinear mazes of great complexity, culminating in concentric circles and circles
with internal vertical barring (Figure 5). The graphic circularity is even detectable in
complex compositions of finger flutings, as in Yaranda Cave, Victoria, which are in
excess of 45 000 years old (Bednarik 2010, Fig. 12). Indeed, all of the known cave art of
Australia (i.e., rock art in limestone caves) consists purely of finger flutings, cupules, cir-
cular forms, parallel line sets, convergent lines motifs and a very few other aniconic
elements (Bednarik 1990). Not a single iconic Australian rock art design has ever been
soundly attributed to the Pleistocene (despite several claims to the contrary) or even to
the early Holocene. The same applies to the purely Mode 3 rock art of Tasmania, domi-
nated by circle patterns and cupules.
The distinctive parallels between the Australian Mode 3 traditions and the only known
Mode 3 petroglyphs of Africa and Europe are remarkable, as no direct cultural transfer is
assumed. There are two potential explanations for these incredible similarities among very
early traditions: they could all have been developed parallel but independently; or they
could have developed from a common origin. The latter seems more likely because the
major central cultural regions of the time, extending from southern Africa to southern
Asia, were probably occupied by groups that were in contact with each other, as suggested

Figure 4. Portable engravings on a forest elephant bone fragment from Bilzingsleben, Germany, c. 400
000 years old.
8 R. G. BEDNARIK

Figure 5. Typical circulinear petroglyphs of the Late Pleistocene in Australia, from Sacred Canyon, final
Pleistocene.

by the considerable similarities in their stone tools and food-extraction practices. More-
over, the first settlers of Australia, south Asians with a Mode 3 technology and seafaring
capability (Bednarik 2003b, 2015) were very probably carriers of this Mode 3 palaeoart
tradition, as evidenced by the earliest Australian rock art. Whereas Mode 3 technology
developed into Mode 4 in the Old World, in Australia it continued to mid-Holocene
times (5000–6000 years ago). By that time the change could no longer affect Tasmania,
sundered from the mainland about 12 000 years ago, and therefore Mode 3 rock art con-
tinued in Tasmania until British colonisation. A similar development can be observed
elsewhere at later times, for instance in the Andaman Islands of India. All the elements
in the entirely aniconic graphic art of the Andaman Jarawas (Figure 6) seem to derive
from end-Pleistocene to very early Holocene art forms in mainland Asia, who it
appears became isolated from the mainland with the sea-level rises of the early Holocene
(Bednarik and Sreenathan 2012).
Among the formal consistencies in Lower and Middle Palaeolithic palaeoart traditions
across four continents, the most obvious is the complete absence of iconicity, which only
appears with the Mode 4 traditions of the early Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and remains
very sparsely represented elsewhere. This apparent indication that palaeoart, for most of
the time it has been in use, was aniconic, completely contradicts the notion that graphic art
 RELIGION 9

Figure 6. The principal elements of the graphic ‘art’ of the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands, Indian
Ocean.

began with iconic depiction (e.g., Breuil 1952; Leroi-Gourhan 1965; Donald 2001).
Another surprising factor is that aniconic art is clearly the more complex system:
whereas in figurative or iconic symbolism, the connection between referent and referrer
is largely via iconicity, the symbolism of non-iconic art is only navigable by possessing
the relevant neural ‘software’ furnished by culture. The meaning of an adequately detailed
iconic depiction is so readily evident that it can even be grasped by some non-human
animals. Figurative art results from a deliberate creation of visual ambiguity (Bednarik
2003a, 408, 412) and is therefore based on lower levels of perception and neural disambi-
guation than nonfigurative art. Figurative or iconic art is therefore the ‘less developed’ art
form and may derive from a ludic or more playful form of graphic expression.

Iconicity and youth

However, this reasoning needs to be qualified by a number of considerations. Firstly, we
can obviously explore these issues only on the basis of existing evidence, and the possibility
of taphonomic bias5 cannot be excluded entirely. So, for instance, if traditions applied to
rock were aniconic, but traditions applied to perishable materials included iconic depic-
tions, none of the latter would be expected to have survived. Secondly, the extreme
rarity of two-dimensional iconicity in the Upper Palaeolithic palaeoart of all of Asia (Bed-
narik 2013c) suggests that, in predominantly aniconic traditions, the rare iconic examples
imply that iconicity was known, but not widely practiced in them. This brings to mind
societies such as those of parts of Australia who practise both art forms, but who tend
to regard aniconic art as the more weighty, mature and sacred mode. Next, the observation
that all known Upper Palaeolithic palaeoart of Europe that permits the estimation of the
age of the artist demonstrates that it was made by juveniles or teenagers (Bednarik 1986,
2008b) implies that much of Franco-Cantabrian cave art might be the work not of adults,
but of children who did what many youngsters still love doing today: explore caves. Several
types of palaeoart permit metrical determination of the age the artist, such as prints and
stencils of body parts, finger flutings of moonmilk or clay, or fingertip imprints on porta-
ble ‘art’ objects; these were generally made by juveniles. Moreover, most imprints on soft
surfaces in the decorated caves, such as footprints, are also by young people, and there is
not a single hand stencil in the Franco-Cantabrian caves by anyone aged more than 20. It
5
Taphonomy deals with the loss of material evidence as a function of time, such as the progressive decay of animal remains,
stone tools, rock art, etc.
10 R. G. BEDNARIK

Figure 7. Spontaneous drawings of the Jarawa boy Enmay, from a society that uses only aniconic ‘art’.

would then be illogical to assume, a priori, that all other Upper Palaeolithic cave art was
made by adults. The null-hypothesis is that it was not.
The underlying proposition of this may sound frivolous, but it has a sound neuropsycho-
logical basis. The curiosity and playfulness of young people are psychologically neotenous
traits (Charlton 2006), which are among those defining modern humans, introduced with
the Upper Palaeolithic (Bednarik 2008b, 2011a). It is highly likely that a significant part of
Eurasian Palaeolithic ‘art’ is a ludic expression of juveniles, and there is empirical support
for this explanation. The Jarawas, mentioned above as possessing a refugial aniconic ‘art’
preserved from the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, have only become available for study
in recent years. This tribe of the Andaman Islands had previously been extremely hostile
to outsiders (Sreenathan, Rao, and Bednarik 2008). The recent study of their rich, exclusively
aniconic ‘art’ led to the surprising discovery that the Jarawas are perfectly capable of produ-
cing iconic imagery, at least when they are young (Bednarik and Sreenathan 2012). Some of
their young people are even exceptionally talented in creating figurative drawings (Figure 7).
But their ludic art is regarded as immature, as the preserve of children or teenagers.

Summary
It is therefore possible that the cave art primarily of southwestern Europe is similarly a
juvenile expression that established itself gradually in some societies, but remained of
limited influence in others. This would explain the dearth of figurative graphic art
during the last phase of the Pleistocene in most parts of the Old World, and its complete
lack in Australia until mid-Holocene times.
To summarise the main findings of this article succinctly:

(1) All surviving graphic palaeoart created until about 40 000 years ago is aniconic.
Between that time and 10 000 years ago, iconic graphic palaeoart becomes
common in parts of Europe, but remains rare in the rest of the Old World.
(2) A preference for aniconic art does not, however, prove that the producers were incap-
able of iconic depiction.
 RELIGION 11

(3) Some ancient traditions considered iconic art as frivolous or puerile, aniconic art as
weighty and adult.
(4) The introduction of iconic palaeoart coincides with the marked neotenisation6 of
humans beginning about 40 000 years ago.
(5) It needs to be emphasised that the above applies only to graphic (two-dimensional)
art; proto-figurines and pareidolic recognition of three-dimensional form extend
back several hundred millennia, and the latter probably three million years.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Robert G. Bednarik is the Convener and Editor-in-Chief of the International Federation of Rock
Art Organisations and is affiliated with the International Centre for Rock Art Dating (ICRAD)
at Hebei Normal University. His research throughout the world has resulted in more than 1400 aca-
demic publications. His principal research interests are the origins of the human ability to create
constructs of reality, and in a variety of fields providing supplementary information in that quest.

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