Feature: Naming names
23 October 2006. By Chrissie Giles.
Whenever I complain about one of our family traits, be it the pale skin, 'prominent' nose, or inability to check what we're saying before it's left our mouths, my mum always blames my dad's genes. And, as long as I'm unmarried, I'm stuck with his surname, too.
Being a female, however, one thing I didn't inherit is a Y chromosome - unlike most men, who get both a Y chromosome and surname from their father. This coinheritance has led scientists to explore whether the Y chromosomes of men with the same surname are alike. Some studies have looked at specific surnames - and have identified a single, common ancestor in men called 'Sykes', for example 1 - but Professor Mark Jobling and Turi King at the University of Leicester have taken a more wide-ranging approach.
"What we're basically doing is asking if there is a signal of shared ancestry in British surnames," explains Professor Jobling. The team, funded by the Wellcome Trust, recruited 150 men with different British surnames and matched them up with same-surname partners randomly selected from the electoral roll. The names chosen represented those of 13 per cent of the UK population, and ranged in frequency from the common 'Smith' (of whom there are over 500 000 in the UK) down to 'Rivis' (numbering just 50). 2
When they compared the Y-chromosome haplotype (a distinct set of genetic markers) of each member of the same-surname pair, they found that nearly a quarter shared 'recent ancestry'. This means that the men had a common ancestor fewer than 20 generations back - after 1300 CE, when surnames were first established in England.
Unsurprisingly, when the team concentrated on the 75 least common surnames, the chance that each pair (be they Beebys, Feakins, or Wigleys) shared the same Y-chromosome haplotype was increased.
In further, as-yet-unpublished work, Professor Jobling explored the link in larger groups of men with the same surnames: "Look at 58 Smiths and the chance of them sharing a Y chromosome is similar to that seen with a random sample of the population; 85 per cent of the Attenboroughs we studied, however, shared a Y."
Although these 'clusters' of shared genes on the Y chromosome might be as old as surnames themselves, many factors affect their distribution. Names do change over time, increase in numbers or go extinct by chance, and some males take on surnames other than their fathers' (in circumstances such as adoption or illegitimacy).
Even so, these surname studies are valuable to genealogists, and have been used in a range of familial and population studies: from tracing the Slavic background of some German men, to locating where certain Sardinian surnames originated, or a population study on the Atlantic island of Tristan de Cunha (which has only seven family names but nine Y-chromosome haplotypes).
Another potential application of this research is the creation of a forensic database that links Y-chromosome profiles with corresponding surnames. The Leicester team found that, when the 80 least-common surnames from their 150 were tested, the chance of a Y-chromosome profile predicting the correct surname was just over a third. While this technique alone could not be used to identify criminals, and is not feasible for common surnames, a crime-scene DNA sample could be used to narrow down a long list of suspects.
So, what's in a name? About a one in four chance of being related, actually. If Shakespeare had had access to Y-chromosome haplotyping, just think how differently Romeo and Juliet could have turned out…
Image credit: iStockphoto
References
1 Sykes B, Irven C. Surnames and the Y chromosome. Am J Hum Genet 2000;66(4):1417-9.
2 King TE et al. Genetic signatures of coancestry within surnames. Curr Biol 2006;16(4):384-8.
External links
- Feature: Lands of our fathers - Y-chromosome diversity and the histories of human populations (24 June 2003, Wellcome Trust Human Genome website).