Migration rates of human populations from surname distributions

Piazza, Alberto; Rendine, S.; Zei, Gianna; Moroni, Antonio; Cavalli-Sforza, Luca

doi:10.1038/329714a0

Cited by 91 publications

(61 citation statements)

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“…25 10 Chinese provinces (2). Surnames are highly correlated with genes here as elsewhere (10,29,30) and one can consider the tree of Han surnames as a good approximation of the genetic tree. Although the surname and linEvolution: Cavalli-Sforza et al…”

Section: Global and Local Studies Of Genetic And Linguistic Coevolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coevolution of genes and languages revisited.

Cavalli-Sforza

Minch

Mountain

1992

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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In an earlier paper it was shown that linguistic families of languages spoken by a set of 38 populations associate rather strongly with an evolutionary tree of the same populations derived from genetic data. While the correlation was clearly high, there was no evaluation of statistical significance; no such test was available at the time. This gap has now been filled by adapting to this aim a procedure based on the consistency index, and the level of significance is found to be much stronger than 10-3. Possible reasons for coevolution of strictly genetic characters and the strictly cultural linguistic system are discussed briefly. Results of this global analysis are compared with those obtained in independent local analyses.In chapter 14 of Origin of Species, Darwin predicted that if one could reconstruct the tree of human evolution one would have the best classification of human languages. One In an earlier paper (3) it was shown that an evolutionary tree of a set of human populations representing the whole world, reconstructed entirely from genetic data, was sufficiently similar to a linguistic classification to suggest coevolution of languages and genes. There is a rationale for expecting coevolution: events responsible for genetic differentiation are very likely to determine linguistic diversification as well. For instance, the physical separation of two or more populations occurring after fission of an initially single population, with migration of one or more splinters to remote geographic areas, is likely to reduce or eliminate further contacts among them. Because such reduced contact contributes to both genetic and linguistic divergence between the splinter populations, both types of divergence tend to increase with the passing of time. To the extent that an evolutionary tree reflects the history of separations in time, the linguistic and genetic evolutionary trees must be parallel.

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Section: Global and Local Studies Of Genetic And Linguistic Coevolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coevolution of genes and languages revisited.

Cavalli-Sforza

Minch

Mountain

1992

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In this way, an analysis of the geographic diffusion of surnames can provide accurate estimates of migration rates 1 and give information to reconstruct the paths followed by men (and their genes) from the beginning of surname history. In addition, if the 'cultural' nature of surnames is considered, it is possible to detect much more ancient migrations which, in some cases, point to a common genetic origin.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From surnames to the history of Y chromosomes: the Sardinian population as a paradigm

et al. 2003

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“…One of the first studies was of Korean immigrants to the USA, using the name "Kim" which is very common in Korea 14 . Piazza and his colleagues 15 did this in Italy and found that the surname method turned out to be surprisingly robust, and gave results comparable with census data and the names in telephone directories. In South America, names have been used as an indicator of the admixture of Spanish and Aymara Indian genes 16 .…”

Section: Introduction: the Use Of Names To Identify Ethnic Nationalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The internal migration of Indian scientists, 1981–2003, from an analysis of surnames

Lewison

Kundra

2008

Scientometrics

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Although many Indian surnames are common across the whole country, some are specifically associated with just one of the 35 states and union territories that comprise India today. For example, Reddy comes from Andhra Pradesh and Das, Ghosh and Roy from West Bengal. We investigated the extent to which researchers with names associated with some of the larger states were writing scientific papers in those states, and in other ones, and to see how these relative concentrations (relative to the whole of India) had changed since the early 1980s. We found that West Bengalis, for example, were now significantly less concentrated in their home state than formerly, and that their concentrations elsewhere were strongly influenced by the state's geographical distance from West Bengal and, to a lesser extent, by the correlation between the scientific profile of their host state and their own preferences (which favored physics and engineering over biology and mathematics). Thus they were strongly represented in nearby Bihar, Assam and Orissa, and much less so in Tamilnadu and Kerala.

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Migration rates of human populations from surname distributions

Cited by 91 publications

References 0 publications

Coevolution of genes and languages revisited.

Coevolution of genes and languages revisited.

From surnames to the history of Y chromosomes: the Sardinian population as a paradigm

The internal migration of Indian scientists, 1981–2003, from an analysis of surnames

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