  In high energy nuclear collisions, production rates of light nuclei agree
with the predictions of an ideal gas at a temperature $T=155 \pm 10$ MeV. In an
equilibrium hadronic medium of this temperature, light nuclei cannot survive.
In this contribution, we suggest that the observed behavior is due to an
evolution in global non-equilibrium, leading to self-organized criticality and
to hadron formation as an absorbing state phase transition for color degrees of
freedom. At the confinement point, the initial quark-gluon medium becomes
quenched by the vacuum, breaking up into all allowed free hadronic and nuclear
mass states, without (or with a very short-live) subsequent formation of
thermal hadronic medium.
