Trends in Genetics
Volume 25, Issue 8, August 2009, Pages 351-360
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Review
What's in a name? Y chromosomes, surnames and the genetic genealogy revolution

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2009.06.003Get rights and content

Heritable surnames are highly diverse cultural markers of coancestry in human populations. A patrilineal surname is inherited in the same way as the non-recombining region of the Y chromosome and there should, therefore, be a correlation between the two. Studies of Y haplotypes within surnames, mostly of the British Isles, reveal high levels of coancestry among surname cohorts and the influence of confounding factors, including multiple founders for names, non-paternities and genetic drift. Combining molecular genetics and surname analysis illuminates population structure and history, has potential applications in forensic studies and, in the form of ‘genetic genealogy’, is an area of rapidly growing interest for the public.

Section snippets

Cultural markers of ancestry

Before Darwin, humans accorded themselves a special place in the kingdom of life. Now, 150 years after the publication of the Origin of Species, we can appreciate that we are part of the continuum of the evolution of all species, but our unique qualities remain undeniable. Homo sapiens literally means ‘knowing man’, but Linnaeus might equally have called us Homo nominans – ‘naming man’ – because of our capacity for complex language and our innate need to apply names to things, and indeed to

History, inheritance and diversity of surnames

In human societies, having a name, and thus being identifiable, is essential. The addition of a heritable element facilitates identification and also marks lineages, providing a label of regional and familial membership. Although some societies (such as that of Iceland) continue to eschew heritable surnames, governments like them and, in some countries, have imposed them quite recently. For example, in Turkey all citizens were obliged to adopt a heritable surname in 1934 and in Mongolia a

Patrilineal surnames and the Y chromosome

Given that DNA passes down to us from our ancestors together with surnames, people sharing surnames should have a greater than average chance of sharing segments of DNA by descent than the general population. Although most DNA is inherited from both parents, there is one segment, the non-recombining region of the Y chromosome, which is only passed down from father to son [6]. We might therefore expect that a surname should correlate with a type of Y chromosome, inherited from a shared paternal

Y chromosome diversity within surnames of the British Isles

Most detailed studies have focused on surnames of the British Isles. The pioneering and eponymous study of the surname Sykes[4] indicated low Y-haplotype diversity among unrelated carriers of the name, suggesting that this was compatible with a single founder. However, its haplotype resolution (four Y-STRs) was low.

The availability of more STRs and haplogroup-defining SNPs (Box 2) has enabled higher-resolution studies to be performed. A general link between surnames and Y haplotypes was

Applications of surname studies

The first application of surnames in genetics was in ‘isonymy’ studies, a field originated by Charles Darwin's son George, in which surnames were used to estimate the degree of inbreeding in populations, based on the frequency of same-surname marriages [12] or on surname frequencies alone [13]. The underlying assumption that a shared surname implies shared ancestry has not been tested in most of the surveyed populations and, as our previous discussion indicates, is often likely to be incorrect

Future developments

Sampling of a wider variety of populations and their surnames will help to alleviate the current geographical bias and should lead to interesting new insight into social and demographic history. However, most new advances will arise from exploitation of recent technological developments. Improvements to the methods of analysis of ancient DNA should enable the testing of genealogical links between living individuals and putative patrilineal ancestors and also among archaeological human remains 47

Acknowledgements

Our work is supported by the Wellcome Trust, including a Senior Research Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science (grant number 057559) to M.A.J. We thank Pablo Mateos for making available summary information on surname frequencies and distributions; Steve Archer, Patricia Balaresque, Francesc Calafell, Holly Eckhardt, Dafeng Hui, Andrew Nicoll and Himla Soodyall for assistance; and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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