The process of catalysis of biochemical reactions has been essential since the first organic molecules appeared on Earth. As the complexity of the ensemble of primitive biomolecules was very low, primitive catalysts had necessarily to be very simple molecules or ions. The evolution of catalysts had to be in parallel with the evolution of the molecular species reacting. An example of this parallel evolution is nucleic acid polymerization. Synthesis of primitive short oligonucleotides could have been catalysed by metal ions either in solution or on the surface of minerals such as montmorillonite clays. Some oligonucleotides could start to function as templates for the synthesis of complementary copies and there is experimental evidence supporting the role also played by metal ions in this process. In later stages of evolution, a group of enzymatic proteins, nucleic acid polymerases, has been selected to catalyse nucleic acid replication. The presence of Mg2+ in the active centre of these enzymes suggests that evolution has preserved some of the primitive catalysts, including them as cofactors of more complex molecules. However, the reasons why Mg2+ was selected among other ions that possibly were present in primitive environments are unknown. In this paper we try to approach this question by analysing the amplification efficiency of the polymerase chain reaction of a DNA fragment in the presence of different metal ions. In some cases the conditions of the reaction have been displaced from optimum (by the presence of nucleotide imbalances and a suboptimal Mg2+concentration). The results obtained permit one to draw interesting conclusions about how some metallic cations can help replication to proceed in conditions of limited substrate availability, a circumstance that could have been frequent at prebiotic stages, when nucleic acid synthesis was dependent on the physico-chemical conditions of the environment.