Czech and Slovak: neighbouring populations with nearly half their ancestry modeled as Western Steppe Herder.

The Czech reference has 48.5% Western Steppe Herder, 37.7% Anatolian Neolithic Farmer and 13.8% Western Hunter-Gatherer. The Slovak reference has the same three components: 49.5%, 36.0% and 14.5%, respectively. The largest difference is just 1.7 percentage points in the farmer-related component.

These labels describe deep layers of ancestry connected to steppe populations, early farmers and hunter-gatherers. Their similar proportions give both references a closely related Central European profile.

Modern matches add regional detail. Czech is closest to German Lower Silesia (0.877) and Hungarian Vojvodina and Banat (0.956), both rated extremely close. German Thuringia (1.054), northern Croatian Kajkavian (1.133) and Austrian Carinthia (1.250) are also extremely close. The carousel selects the nearest German and Hungarian references to keep the national flags distinct, alongside Slovak.

Slovak is closest to Polish Ukraine Podolia (1.305), followed by Czech (1.972) and Ukrainian Ternopil (2.009), all rated very close. Those are also the three displayed cards. Polish Silesia (2.098), German Lower Silesia (2.145) and Ukrainian Zakarpattia (2.150) extend that similarity across neighbouring regions. “Polish Ukraine Podolia” names a Polish reference from Podolia, not the whole Ukrainian population.

The Czech–Slovak distance is 1.972 in both directions. These are model-based population averages: the Czech reference has 175 samples, Slovak 6, and the Podolia and Ternopil references just 2 each. Regional sampling can affect the ranking, and genetic distance is not a percentage of shared DNA.

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