How did quarks group together at the start of the universe?

[Coolamebe]

I know that quarks can never exist in isolation, and also group up so that they have a net neutral colour charge. But I am wondering at the start of the universe, or under very, very extreme conditions (such as the start of the universe) would quarks have been able to exist by themselves. I have this question because I've seen that quarks came before atomic nuclei (and therefore protons) in the big bang. So does this mean that before protons, there were some quarks by themselves, or did every single quark form another type of hadron or meson or something else? Would pentaquarks and other large groups of quarks have been common at the start?

 

[Vanadium 50]

At the beginning of the universe, things were so dense that statements like "that quark pair up with that one" are meaningless.

You can see a similar (but not identical) phenomenon in salt - things are so dense that you can't say that sodium atom pairs up with that chlorine atom.

 

[mfb]

The very early universe had a quark-gluon plasma, where quarks were not bound to hadrons. We can recreate this state in today's colliders.