Before revision:  At the chosen temperature cycling, a network of positive feedback loops arose from both the cooperative ligation of matching sequences and the emerging increase in sequence length. It generated higher-order replication with frequency-dependent selection. The experiments matched a complete simulation using experimentally determined ligation rates and the hypercycle mechanism was also confirmed by abstracted modeling. Since templated ligation is a most basic reaction of oligonucleotides, the described mechanism could have been implemented under microthermal convection on early Earth .
After revision:  At the chosen temperature cycling, a network of positive feedback loops arose from both the cooperative ligation of matching sequences which self-promoted their own elongation. This led to a cascade of enhanced template binding and faster ligation reactions. A requirement was the reshuffling of the strands by thermal cycling, enabled for example by microscale convection. Assuming that templated ligation was driven by the same chemical mechanism that generated prebiotic polymerization of oligonucleotides, the described mechanism could have been implemented under microthermal convection on early Earth .