The Human Genome Diversity Project, or HGDP, was an effort led by US-based scientists to collect DNA from members of Indigenous communities living around the world for the purpose of understanding human history, migration, and evolution. Launched in 1991, and led by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a scientist at Stanford University in Stanford, California, the HGDP initially had the support of US funding agencies. However, the project eventually lost that support when representatives of Indigenous groups protested the project as being exploitative and fellow scientists accused it of racism. Though the project ultimately failed to collect most of the samples it had originally planned, the HGDP was one of the first attempts by scientists to catalogue worldwide human genetic variation, and the DNA samples it did collect formed the basis of many subsequent research studies concerned with understanding human genetic variation and migration patterns.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1922–2018) was a researcher whose work explored the relationships between human genetic diversity and historical migrations, integrating genetics and anthropology to determine how humans populated the world. Prior to his work in human genetics, Cavalli-Sforza studied genetic recombination in bacteria and helped determine the system of genetic inheritance within Escherichia coli in the late 1940s. After pivoting his research focus and assuming a long-term teaching and research position at Stanford University in Stanford, California, in 1971, Cavalli-Sforza participated in studies that modeled human migration, focusing on the global spread of agriculture during the Neolithic period. He was also one of the founders in the creation of the Human Genome Diversity Project, or HGDP, an international scientific collaboration launched in the early 1990s to map the genetic diversity of human populations across the globe. Cavalli-Sforza’s interdisciplinary approach to studying human history and human evolution left its mark on the fields of both genetics and anthropology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.