Homo_sapiens

Thank you all for your help! I really appreciate the knowledge everyone has shared. It is interesting we use gene mutations as a dating method. I wonder how accurate such a procedure really is.

First off, this is my very first post. Forgive any errors. I am curious to know if genetic mutations can be predicted within a given population, given a certain amount of time. I can certainly understand that predicting exactly what mutation will occur could very well be nearly impossible. I am, however, interested in knowing if we can say that a mutation could probably happen within X number of years, within a population number of X. The population most likely will not remain a constant, but perhaps if we knew the size of a given population to begin with it might affect the prediction going out any number of years?