The original version was developed as a set of standalone C programs by Nick Patterson and colleagues and published in 2012.

[3][4] Most ADMIXTOOLS programs are based on fitting demographic models to f-statistics, which are calculated from population allele frequencies.

[8] ADMIXTOOLS 2 adds functionality for finding optimized graph topologies, similar to programs like Treemix.

[9] Related statistical tools in the ADMIXTOOLS software package include qpAdm,[10] qpfst, qpF4ratio, qp3Pop, qpBound, qpDstat, and qpWave.

[11] qpDstat and qpWave test whether populations form clades, while qpAdm estimates ancestry proportions.