The Carolina Dog – aka: The Native American Dog

Fascinating. I had never heard of this breed until yesterday.
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Link

During the last thirty years, the capture and study of free-ranging dogs in remote areas of South Carolina and Georgia has revealed the existence of dogs of primitive appearance fitting the typical long-term pariah (i.e. primitive dog) morphotype. Their physical appearance suggests a dog created by and preserved through natural selection to survive in the remote lowland swamp and woodland areas of the southeastern United States. They closely resemble types of dogs first encountered by Europeans near Indian settlements in the region as is evidenced by paintings, drawings and written descriptions made by these early explorers and settlers.

........we may have in the Carolina Dog a domestic dog that evolved in North America from crosses of the aboriginal dogs that came across the Bering Strait (with the Paleolithic hunter bands) with North American wolves and/or coyotes. This could be a type of dog domesticated solely from North American wild canids, developed free of Asian or European genetic composition up until the introduction of Eurasian domestics by European settlers.

..........The Carolina Dog would represent domestication in reverse. This would be a situation where a completely domesticated animal would have turned its back on modem human society and fled to the wilds to evolve as a completely new type (breed) free of direct human intervention and/or supervision. Long dormant instincts would have reemerged in the wild to aid/allow their survival. Those domestic physical and behavioral traits not suited for survival in the wild would have been selected against and removed from the gene pool. This would represent a reemergence of the "original dog type" which first emerged over 12,000 years ago. Should this hypothesis prove true, we would have in our midst a dog unique in the world in that it would represent a case study of domestication/evolution in reverse, i.e., a return to the original dog type. No other breed of dog could/can make that claim.

From Free North Carolina