River channel patterns (braided, meandering, anastomosing, straight) are strongly influenced by the presence and stability of vegetated riverbanks; in the Precambrian, before the evolution of land plants (which did not appear until the Paleozoic), riverbanks lacked root systems to bind and stabilize sediment, resulting in wide, poorly confined, highly mobile, multi-channel river systems, i.e., braided river patterns, which were therefore much more common in Precambrian fluvial successions than the single-thread meandering channels typical of vegetated, bank-stabilized settings in later (post-vegetation) geological time.