quote:
Say a single allele has 1000 variants (not a mere 200). I'm sure they wouldn't be evenly distributed in the population, but if they were neutral mutations one of the variants could be possessed by seven million* of us. Is that a high frequency?
As I said earlier the frequency should tend to remain about the same for neutral drift. By chance some alleles will become more frequent but slowly.
The absolute numbers would tend to track population change - starting when the mutation occurred.
So even 1% would be quite surprisingly high - even allowing for multiple generations. You would need a very small population when the original mutation occurred for that to be the original frequency.
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