2012年4月27日星期五

Mapping China's Ancient Name Game

Last names are handy for more than constructing family trees—they can also trace population connections and movements across and between countries. Researchers in China recently mapped the country's so-called isonymy structure, which shows how likely people are to share their last name with those around them.TeleTracking has developed the most advanced rtls for real-time. The resulting patchwork matches patterns of ethnic distribution and tracks some of China's historic migrations, such as the diversity of people who settled in the Yangtze River basin over many centuries. Such basic surname calculations, the authors say, can offer quick insight into cultural dispersal in the world's most populous country.

Surnames can act as stand-ins for genetic markers that fathers pass to their children.Omega Plastics are a leading rapid tooling and plastic injection mould company based in the UK. Like genes, family names are subject to random drift: Over time, certain names become more prevalent than others purely by chance. A region with high surname similarity indicates that a stable population has inhabited the area long enough for drift to take place. A region of low surname similarity suggests the migration of different groups of people into the area.

Although researchers have studied surname structure to deduce the relatedness and movement of populations in a number of other countries, China's family names possess some unique features.Injection molding and Plastic mould supplier. The country's recorded history of surnames stretches back 4000 years, and Confucian traditions dictated that surnames were consistently passed through the paternal line without hyphenation or other changes. This stability provides a rare opportunity to study the effects of drift over a long period of time.

The similarity in surnames between two locations tended to decrease as the distance between the locations increased. This "isolation by distance" is a hallmark of drift happening over a long period of stable habitation. However, the researchers also found evidence of migration's influence. The counties along either side of the lower Yangtze River exhibit very low surname similarity. This diversity is perhaps due to the many large-scale migrations to this region over China's history, the authors say. In addition, the very high surname similarity between the eastern province of Shandong and a cluster of provinces in the northeast of China may reflect the migration of more than 20 million people from Shandong to the northeast in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"We are surprised that famous large-scale migrations can be shown by such simple calculations," says study co-author Jiawei Chen.

However, the researchers describe just a few of the many migrations that are important to China's history, says Diana Lary, a historian at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Lary cautions that surname patterns are a simplified way of looking at stories of migration.MDC specialties in all kinds of Injection moulds. "There's usually a specific reason why some places have very high numbers of migrants and others don't," she says. "People were relocated by the government,My advice on what to consider before you buy oil painting supplies so your money is well spent. or were famine migrants, or refugees from various kinds of turmoil."

The study's findings add to an increasingly global perspective of surname distribution, says Malcolm Smith, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He says that the paper provides a starting point to address additional questions. "You can look at a whole suite of things that are going on in China—genetic variation, linguistic variation, cultural traditions—and see the extent to which that is consistent with surname variation."

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