Primaeval soup

There are several favorite notions of the site of the origin of life (Nisbet, 1987). The best known is the Marxist hypothesis of the primaeval soup — that the early ocean was a soup of organic molecules that had fallen in from meteorites (which frequently contain complex carbon-chain compounds organic chemicals, but made by prebiotic inorganic processes). In this soup, lipid blobs somehow evolved into living cells. The discovery of hydrothermal systems led to the realization that early oceans would have pervasively reacted with basalt, both in hydro-thermal systems and also with basalt ejecta after impacts. Thus, the late Hadean ocean was most unlikely to be a festering broth, but more likely a cool clean ocean not greatly dissimilar to the modem ocean exit the primaeval soup. 

The notion of a primaeval (or prebiotic) soup implies that the early ocean was a "soup" of organic molecules. Within this melee chemical reactions took place, polymerized molecules formed and learned to self-replicate, finally to emerge as living cells. In reality, the ancient oceans probably had very active hydrothermal systems in which large volumes of water were circulated through the upper levels of the oceanic crust and so were unlikely to be an active meeting place for organic molecules (Nisbet Fowler, 2003). 

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