Hi firewns,
You said: Living beings come to be due to the arising of the five skhandhas in a new bhava.
Though you say that living beings arise due to five skandha, we can go back further to find the actual root cause of this through paticca samuppada. According to PS the root cause is avijja (ignorance) and this in turn leads to bava and jati.
The way I look at it, the beginning is avijja. The beginning referred to here is based on sequences rather than a time scale.
This also leads us to how we can get out of this cycle and that is through eradicating avijja completely and without a trace.