The Network provides resources for improving communications between scientists, science communicators, and science journalists. The Network's website will provide news and events relevant to genetics and biotechnology, a database of organisations and contacts in Africa exploring the implications of genetics and biotechnology, and an interactive forum section.

The Living History Project has been completed. A final report on the results has been written by Professor Himla Soodyall of National Health Laboratory Service and School of Pathology, University of the Witwatersrand.

The report is available as a PDF file, and can be downloaded here.

The Living History research enterprise aimed to take DNA samples from about 500 - 1000 South Africans in order to trace their geographical ancestry.

It provides the first national database available in the public domain. The gene pool found in the present-day South African population draws from the indigenous people of Southern Africa, namely the former hunters or San groups, the pastoral Khoikhoi who are thought to have migrated to the Cape in the last 2,000 years introducing sheep and cattle to the region, and people originating from the Niger-Congo area speaking Nguni-languages who migrated south in the last 1,200 years. In addition, sea-borne immigrants from Western Europe (largely from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and France), indentured labourers from India and slaves from the Malaysian Archipelago, Madagascar and other parts of Africa, have also contributed to the gene pool. 

We wish to provide a DNA map of the genetic heritage and, thereby, adding an additional layer of information to our self-understanding of where we come from and who we are.

Project Associates: Mr Anton van Dorsten (Ancestry24) and Associate Professor Himla Soodyall (University of the Witwatersrand).

Funded by Ancestry24.com

Table of Articles on The Living History project:

“WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.” 

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species 

Darwin200 is an international programme of events celebrating Charles Darwin's scientific ideas and their impact around his bicentenary on 12 February 2009.

First published 150 years ago in the book On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s ideas live on as the central organising concept of modern biology. The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Yet when it was first published Darwin’s book provoked a storm of controversy, some of which continues today. What turned a fairly ordinary young man into the great thinker who wrote the Origin of Species?