Surnames can describe populations genetic structure.

Surnames and genes share both the type of vertical transmission and the nature of "selectively neutral characters" that is peculiar to all surnames and most genes. The possibility to obtain from surname frequencies genetic information like that can be obtained from gene frequencies was tested in various areas of Italy in which both types of data were available. Corrections to the estimates from surnames were necessary to make them comparable with the direct estimates from genes. A great similarity was observed between the results obtained with the two different series of data, showing that surnames, numerous and cheap, can be a useful tool for investigating the genetic structure of local populations.