Fixed in time, the waves of a shallow sea which rippled its sandy bed at the dawn of life, perhaps one and a half millennia ago, are now seen again in ripple stones among shattered Precambrian rocks of Lawn Hill Gorge, northwest Queensland, Australia. The red sandstones are of extreme antiquity, having been laid down in a seabed about 1,560 million years ago in the Proterozoic Eon, before the evolution of life beyond bacteria and stromatolites.