Chromosome jumping (or chromosome hopping) was first described in 1984 by Collins and Weissman.
At the time, cloning techniques allowed for generation of clones of limited size (up to 240kb), and cytogenetic techniques allowed for mapping such clones to a small region of a particular chromosome to a resolution of around 5-10Mb. Therefore, a major gap remained in resolution between available technologies, and no methods were available for mapping larger areas of the genome.