Many of the suggested definitions for the phenomenon of life stress the fundamental importance of oligomeric species demonstrating storable, replicable, and evolvable informational capacity. The chemical problem of the origin-of-life might therefore reduce to a prebiotically plausible mechanism for the formation of a first generation of proto-informational oligomeric material on the early Earth. This talk will present an outline of a new chemical model which is currently being developed, and which would seem to be on the way to providing an intuitively satisfying solution to the problem of the origin of the first proto-informational oligomers at the origin of life.