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When you marry,

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usually you take on your partner's surname
or your parter takes on yours.

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Two people with different surnames become

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two people with the same.

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One surname spreads, the other one goes...

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...extinct? Usually not.

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There might be siblings, cousins,

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strangers who happen to share the surname,

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to carry it on for the one who lost it.

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But if one person fails to pass on the surname,

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so might the others.

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In fact, every now and then

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entire surnames do go extinct

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when its last bearer passes away

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without passing it on.

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According to the Daily Mail,

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in England and Wales, 200,000 surnames

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were lost since 1901.

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You can find lists of endangered surnames

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on websites such as Ancestry.com and myheritage.com

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Ancestry counts surnames with less than

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50 carriers left as endangered,

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which in England and Wales,

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would currently be names such as

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Pober, Mirren, Febland (heh, Febland),

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Nighy - N-Nighy?

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While some of these names might be 
more of a loss than others,

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it's sad to think that they might all 
cease to exist within a few generations.

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Back in the days, new surnames 
were created as well

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based on someone's job or father's given name or where they came from.

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But that doesn't really happen anymore,

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not on a large scale, anyway.

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So more surnames are lost than
new ones are being born.

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Keep this experiment going long enough,


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and we will all end up with
the same surname eventually, won't we?

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When we look at Earth's more ancient
civilizations - even more ancient-

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intensive research reveals that most 
Chinese surnames in use today

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were handed down from thousands of years ago.

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While historically about 12,000 
Chinese surnames have been recorded,

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only a bit over 3,000 are currently in use,

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a reduction of 75 percent!

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And only a fraction of those are taking 
over a majority of the entire population.

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The three most common surnames in mainland
China are Li, Wang and Zhang,

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which make up for more than 7 percent 
of the Chinese population each.

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Together they belong to close to
300 million people

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and are easily the most common surnames
in the world.

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In China, the phrase "three Zhang, four Li"
is used to say just "anybody."

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So after thousands of years, 
the Chinese people aren't down to

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one all-dominating surname, but several.

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What's going on here?

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This effect can be shown in a simulation.

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What you see here is the result of a 
Galton-Watson process,

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which maps out how the distribution of
family names changes over time.

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It starts out with a very large number
of unique family names


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each represented by a different color, 
and after 40 generations,

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or around a thousand years,
ends with the ones which are left.

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When you look at the very end there,

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what you see is very similar to the Chinese situation.

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The top three names take over 20 percent
of the cake.

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But the question is: 
if we keep the simulation going,

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will we end up with only one surname?

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Mathematically, the entire population does
converge to only one surname.

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But in real life, if we start out with,
say, 10,000 surnames,

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(and there are actually
much more than that)

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after 40 generations we'd still be left
with over 400.

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Okay, how about 200 generations?

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Still 93 left.

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While the less frequent names
are dying out quickly,

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the more frequent ones
become so widely spread

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that humans will probably cease to exist
before they do.

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The probability of extinction of

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a unique family name that is carried
by only one young couple

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is 45 percent, at least in the West.

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That's the average likelihood of them
having no children

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or only children who won't pass
on the family name.

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But the likelihood of a family name
which is held by multiple couples

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going extinct within one generation
is 45 percent to the power of the number of couples.

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So with a few more people sharing a surname
it becomes very unlikely very quickly

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that this surname should disappear soon.

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If you want to know how often your
family name is currently in use,

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you can find that out on websites such as
Forebears.

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According to the US Census Bureau,

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the most common family names
in the US are currently

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Smith, Johnson, and Williams,

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which together make up for around
2 percent of the entire US population.

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That's, of course, not very impressive
to China.

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In a way, you could say that 
on this timeline, the US is somewhere here

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while China is already over there.

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As fewer family names
become more widely spread,

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we might follow the Chinese feat and
become more creative about given names.

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So instead of Tim Smith, 


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you might be called the
TalentedPeaceful Smith.

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And, instead of Tom, I might be called
The Rest of Us.