A CHARLES Sturt University lecturer has extended his interest in biochemistry and ageing to explore the possibility that some ancient people may have held a recipe to extend their life.
Dr Michael Cahill has spent the past 12 years researching different elements of mythology, linguistics, ancient texts, astronomy, earth sciences, human genetics and the cell biology of ageing to pen Paradise Rediscovered – a two-volume series that attempts to reconstruct the Neolithical society that gave rise to the first civilisation, examining the possibility that they may have possessed the ‘legendary elixir of life’.
Dr Cahill said he first became interested in the subject after reading Noah’s Flood, where authors William Ryan and Walter Pitman discuss how the Black Sea flooded around 6000 years before Christ, controversially describing it as the biblical flood.
From there, Dr Cahill began exploring other textual accounts such as Genesis, The Book of Enoch and the Epic of Gilgamesh, which all describe circumstances leading to similar floods.
“I thought is there anything in there that would indicate the flood came from the Black Sea, and basically I was surprised when there was,” he said.
From there his interest deepened. Dr Cahill described the text as a “colloquial and non-academic provocative style” and hoped it would make readers think differently about the world.
