You have probably wondered more than once if you are related to those people who have the same last name as you. Well now a study carried out in Spain has shown that it is, but only if your surname is rare.
According to the main author of the article, Conrado Martínez-Cadenas, a researcher at the Jaume I University of Castellón and the University of Oxford, “ most of the men who share relatively rare surnames – with less than 6,000 carriers in total in the territory national- they also tend to share an identical or very similar Y chromosome, which means that they are descended from the same original founders of said surname through the father’s path ”.
Question of frequency
Similarly, it has also been confirmed that the more common the surnames, the correlation on the Y chromosome is lost, so there would be no offspring from the same lineage. The author has also pointed out that “the correlation between surname and Y chromosome does not depend at all on the geographical origin or the type of surname, only on the frequency .”
To demonstrate this, 37 surnames representing a broad spectrum of frequencies were selected and classified into five groups: very frequent (Fernández and Martínez), with more than 150,000 carriers; moderately frequent (Aguirre and Díez), between 15,000 and 150,000 individuals; moderately frequent (Tirado and Ibarra), between 5,000 and 15,000 carriers; infrequent (Bengoechea and Cadenas), between 3,000 and 5,000 carriers; and very rare (Nortes and Albiol), between 100 and 3,000 carriers.
Before this study on Spanish surnames, the only investigations on the correlation between surnames and Y chromosome had taken place in Great Britain – where the correlation patterns correspond to those of Spain – and Ireland .
In the latter country, the reverse process occurs : some very common surnames have a correlation between surname and Y chromosome. “The analyzes indicate that Irish surnames are much older than those of Spain and the United Kingdom and that they correlate regardless of frequency” , says Martínez-Cadenas.
The research has been published in the European Journal of Human Genetics .
Source: SINC
