The lines are there for when the commits are far apart.. (I do not know what the magic number is on the arrow creation).
If it did not have the arrows there would be a very big bar that goes all the way down to the upwards arrow.
For performance reasons, rather than trying to generate this line it simply makes an arrow you can click on that will scroll you to the correct commit. This may not make a lot of sense to you right now, but if you have ever seen the Log for Linux or Git on Github, you will see alot of these. Some of them I have seen with 30 arrows from the same commit.