Where did the idea of surnames come from?

What is an "ATAR" result?

>>2572880
Australian Tertiary Admission Results,

Some sort of college entrance testing rankings?

What I want to know is why are Irish surnames the largest portion of the list after Chinese?

Various honorifics, patronymns, matronymns, etc. people would adopt to distinguish themselves from other people that shared their name.

>>2572904
Irish names in Australia? Seems to makes sense.

>>2572904
>former british prison colony
you know why

>>2572867
>Where did the idea of surnames come from?
Because humans name things like crazy. Once the concept of different families emerged, sticking different names on them would have been pretty automatic.

>>2572867

Too many people had the same name and they were running out of new names. So they came up with surnames.

>>2572920
That explains the shitposting.

>>2572959
It was also to point out what clan or tribe you came from.

Literally Napoleon

>>2572867
Maybe I am blind but where is Kim and Nguyen?

And India has a TON of Rajesh's.

It depends on the culture you're asking about

For the Japanese it usually has to do with what clan someones family is from, but common English names usually had to do someone's profession: i.e. John the fletcher becomes John Fletcher, and his son might be John Fletcherson or some shit

surnames come from serfdom.

serfs carried the surname of their lord. that's why when you see retards looking up their family surname crest, they always stumble on some knight in england, and think they were some royalty, when in fact they are direct descendants of serfs living on that lord's land

>>2572867
>Brennan
>indian

>>2572867
>freeman
>white
wew

>>2572951
Not true. Surnames were not really a thing until the early modern period when the government forced every peasant to get one.

>>2573235
You're confusing European serfdom with American slavery, retard.

>>2573235
>>2573316
Roman slaves also took their master's family /clan name when manumitted.

>>2573312
Family names predate early Modern Period Europe.

t. Gaius Marius, 7 times Consul of Rome.

>>2573201
My Frisian grandfather explained something similar to me. Say your name is Peter. You have a son, named John. John would go around town saying, "I'm John, Peter's son". Or "John Peterson". His son could be named William Johnson.

Gramps never explained to my why the surname stopped flip flopping through the generations, why they stuck to one. My guess is that the peasants caught on to some fad that the nobility were doing. Nobles and their titles and such.

>>2573401
But this didn't happen in feudal Europe. People often took a surname from their profession (Smith, Tanner, Hunter, Dyer, Miller, Shepherd, Thatcher), patronymics (Johnson, Jackson, Robertson, Stevenson, Peterson) or places they lived at (Bentley, Wicks, Scott, Stone, Darby, Ripley). Nobody was named after their lord, do you think there was a lot of serfs called Baskerville, Montbray or Tremoille?

File: totempole.jpg (27KB, 297x500px) Image search: [Google]

27KB, 297x500px

Totem animals.

>>2572867
>The D'Souza family
D'amn.

>>2573312
>who was Gaius of the Caesar branch of the Julii family