For those who said they were curious on my earlier post about just my Hungarian/Slovakian DNA. (All 70 of you) This is the full spread of my genetics. As you can tell, I’m an American born mutt. I would love to learn more about Slovakia though 🙂 how close is it with neighboring peoples?
3 comments
honest question. why are you americans obsessed with genetics and ancestry, when y’all already have your own culture?
To answer your question, Slavakia, Hungary and Croatia all were part of a single state (although not all with equal rights and willingness to be there, lol). So the spread of genetics you see there makes sense, although its quite interesting.
When it comes to how things are today, well Czechs are still our brothers, Hungarians are the odd neighbour that sometimes gets drunk and says a ton of racist shit but most of the time is just ok. Croatia has a nickname slovakian sea, because its THE destination for slovaks.
In short: DNA tests can’t tell you what countries or nationalities your ancestors belonged to. It can’t tell you you are 25% Italian, 14% German, 43% Slovak and 8% Irish. Those percentages do not necessarily mean that you actually had ancestors from those countries.
Any dna test giving you specific data like that is a scam. DNA changes very slowly compared to culture and language. Two people with very similar DNA can actually have a long family line from very separate cultures. Your family could be German going back 2000 years and another person’s family with very similar genes could be Slavic all the way back. The similarity simply means that 5-10.000 years ago both populations had a common ancestry. Go back 150.000 years and all human populations share the same ancestry.
DNA can tell you where your ancestors migrated from over thousands of years. It can also tell you what general geographic region your ancestors were from but it cannot tell you that you had a German ancestor in the 1700’s and a French ancestor in the 1500’s.
When DNA tests give you country specific information they are working with sample populations and probabilities. They have the genetic makeup of thousands of Germans and thousands of French people and they compare your genes to those samples and they try to determine which sample you match more. The percentages you see are not the percentages of your ancestry, it’s the percentage of the match to that given sample.
In the example above 43% East Slovak and North East Hungarian doesn’t mean he is 43% Slovak because he had a Slovak grandpa or something, it means that the similarity between the East Slovak sample and his genes match to a 43% accuracy.