Lisa Zyga at physorg.com:

Until very recently, asking what happened at or before the Big Bang was considered by physicists to be a religious question. General relativity theory just doesn’t go there – at T=0, it spews out zeros, infinities, and errors – and so the question didn’t make sense from a scientific view. But in the past few years, a new theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) has emerged. The theory suggests the possibility of a “quantum bounce,” where our universe stems from the collapse of a previous universe. Yet what that previous universe looked like was still beyond answering.

Now, physicists Alejandro Corichi from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Parampreet Singh from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario have developed a simplified LQG model that gives an intriguing answer: a pre-Big Bang universe might have looked a lot like ours.

From the abstract of the paper:

Loop quantum cosmology predicts that, in simple models, the big bang singularity of classical general relativity is replaced by a quantum bounce. Because of the extreme physical conditions near the bounce, a natural question is whether the universe can retain, after the bounce, its memory about the previous epoch. More precisely, does the universe retain various properties of the state after evolving unitarily through the bounce or does it suffer from some cosmic amnesia as has been recently suggested? Here we show that this issue can be answered unambiguously at least within an exactly solvable model, derived from a small simplification of loop quantum cosmology, for which there is full analytical control on the quantum theory. We show that if there exists a semiclassical state at late times on one side, peaked around a pair of canonically conjugate variables, then there are very strong bounds on the fluctuations on the other side of the bounce, implying semi-classicality. For such a model universe which grows to a size of 1 megaparsec, at late times, the change in relative fluctuations of the only non-trivial observable of the model across the bounce is less than $10^{-56}$ (becoming smaller for universes which grow larger). The universe maintains (an almost) total recall.

I have to say for a long time I have thought a very poetic answer to the "what was before the big bang" question was just that it was a continual cycle of expansion and contraction. This implies that the entire universe has a future boundary condition (see Lawrence S. Schulman), and that time will reverse and we all will live our lives backwards "again". Of course with the arrow of time running backwards, it would look like an expansion, and everything would seem normal.