When does history begin It is tempting to reply "in the beginning", but
like many obvious answers, this is turned out to be unhelpful soon. As a 67. ______
great Swiss historian once points out in another connection, history is the 68. ______
one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. If we want to, we
can trace the chain of human descent back to the appear of vertebrates 69. ______
(脊椎动物), or even to the photosynthetic (光合的) cells which lie at
the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginably 70. ______
upheavals (剧变) which formed this planet and even to the origins of
universe. Yet this is not "history". 71. ______
Commonsense helps here: history is the story of mankind, what it has 72. ______
done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have
histories, so human beings do. Even when historians write about a natural 73. ______
process beyond human control, such as the ups and down of climate, or 74. ______
the spread of disease, they do so only because it helps us to understand
why men and women have lived (and died) in some ways rather than
others. This suggests that all what we have to do is to identify the 75. ______
moment which the first human beings step out from the shadows of the 76. ______
remote past.