How did life get a foothold on Earth almost four billion years ago? Here's an idea from ScienceDaily.

Protein-like structures from the primordial soup

The scientists performed an experiment to demonstrate that it is remarkably easy for such amyloid structures to assemble spontaneously from building blocks that existed on the prebiotic Earth, and under reaction conditions that also seem plausible for the primeval era. The scientists used four simple amino acids as starting materials: glycine, alanine, aspartate and valine. In addition, they used carbonyl sulphide as a catalyst for the reaction. This volcanic gas is also likely to have existed in the atmosphere billions of years ago.