For years, they were little more than mysterious scratches on a cave wall.

The horizontal lines of red pigment are evenly spaced and arranged in a way that suggests “a deliberate and structured pattern,” according to a study.

New research places a once-dismissed, and weirdly modern, piece of rock art back into the ‘Stone Age’ canon.

Inside a limestone cave on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales, eleven parallel horizontal lines of red pigment have been sitting on a cave wall for roughly 17,100 years. They were…

For years, they were little more than mysterious scratches on a cave wall.