In the beginning the Earth wasn't exactly a hospitable place. It was hot, volcanic, and oxygen was a rare commodity. So the question now is how did life emerge from these conditions? We are still asking this 4.6 billion years later. Darwin proposed a primordial pond that was teeming with the just the right materials for life to form. If so, what happened in this little pond 3.9 billion years ago set the stage for everything the followed.