A small quant. for weekend chewing. Assume you are 25 years old and so you can only look back 25 years into your past. So, you are biological product of two people, your parents. So you carry genes of two people. What if you look back into 50 years window?  you carry genes of 6 people - your 2 parents and 4 grandparents (2^1+2^2). Similarly, past window of 75 years and 100 years translate to 14 people and 30 people respectively. So from the ‘simple past’ of just last 100 years, you carry genes of 30 people and in 200 years, you carry a gene pool of 500 odd people. Isn’t it amazing??? When it is said that each one of us is unique, perhaps, biologically and historically, it is the genepool that is distinctly unique. The formula can be generalized to (n=1 to N/25) Sigma(2^n), n take only discreet values of multiples of 25, 25 years being roughly one generational span. This formula might hold good for few hundred years, but I guess, consanguineous marriages, few adventurous males, geographic limitations and common ancestors would have distorted the equation greatly. Just like explosion come in the way of exponential nuclear fissions, some of the natural phenomena would have stopped the uniqueness ‘thing’. Otherwise, 1000 years back, as per the equation, there were no one trillion people (2+….+2^(1000/25)).

In short and sweet, it is a nice feeling for the weekend that you carry unique genepool of 125 plus people since first war of independence (1857) :D. Do the math yourself.