significance in these movements. Genetic testing Since the Y chromosome is inherited only from one's father (women have no Y chromosome), all direct male lineages share a common haplotype. Therefore, testing was done across sectors of the Jewish and non-Jewish population to see if there was any commonality among their Y chromosomes. The initial research by Hammer, Skorecki, et al. was based on a limited study of 188 subjects, which identified a narrow set of genetic markers found in slightly more than 50% of Jews with a tradition of priestly descent and approximately 5% of Jews who did not believe themselves to be kohanim. Over the succeeding decade, Hammer, Skorecki, and other researchers continued to collect genetic material from Jewish and non-Jewish populations around the world. The most recent results suggest that 46% of those who have a family tradition of being Cohanim belong to the Y-DNA haplogroup identified as J-P58, and that at least two-thirds of that 46% have very similar Y-DNA sequences indicating comparatively recent common ancestry. A further 14% of kohanim were found to belong to another lineage, in haplogroup J2a-M410. In contrast, the so-called Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH), a characteristic Y chromosome haplotype earlier identified in a majority of men self-reporting as kohanim, is found in as much as 5% to 8% of Jews who have no family tradition of being kohanim, and only 1.5% were found to have the closest match to the most detailed sequence. Amongst non-Jews, the CMH can be found among non-Jewish Yemenites (>67.7%) and Jordanians (~7%), but none were found to most closely match the most detailed sequence. Cohen (and its variations) as a surname The status of kohen in Judaism has no necessary relationship to a person's surname. Although descendants of kohanim often bear surnames that reflect their genealogy, there are many families with the surname Cohen (or any number of variations) who are not kohanim nor even Jewish. Conversely, there are many kohanim who do not have Cohen as a surname. There are numerous variations to the spelling of the surname Cohen. These are often corrupted by translation or transliteration into or from other languages, as exemplified below (not a complete list). English: Cohen, Kohen, Cowen, Cowan, Cahn, Kahn, Cahan, Carne, Cohn, Cone, Conn, Conway, Cohan, Cohaner, Cahanman, Chapman, Chaplan, Keohan, Kaplan, Katz (a Hebrew abbreviation for kohen zedek (כהן צדק) "righteous priest"), HaCohen, (Cohan is also an Irish