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The folks at the shelter said Lucy The Dog was a terrier/hound mix, but I figured that was just a guess. I thought she resembled a moose, with her long skinny legs and barrel-shaped chest, so I added “The Dog” to her name – you know, to clear up any confusion. A technician at the veterinarian’s office called her an LBD, short for “little brown dog.” I later started dating a man (he’s now my husband) who presented a new theory: Lucy is a Carolina Dog – a free-spirited mascot of the Southeast, a gentle but suspicious soul with kibble...

Story by Cy Brown Photos by Kaylinn GilstrapDeember 27, 2014 He got Penny for Christmas. He didn’t know he would get a trip into the deepest reaches of the 14,000-year history of dogs in North America.Things we love in the South: Moon Pies, SEC football, Otis Redding, Flannery O’Connor, Cheerwine and, probably more than anything else, our dogs. What is it about Southerners and our dogs? Maybe it's because in the South, we're a bit more country than our cousins to the north. Perhaps we are a generation or two fewer removed from the time when having a dog was...

BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed. These are Carolina dogs, and though they are friendly, one can instantly sense they are different from other dogs. Several rush to the gate, their whole bodies wagging eagerly. Others sprint...

Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis Barbara van Asch et al. Dogs were present in pre-Columbian America, presumably brought by early human migrants from Asia. Studies of free-ranging village/street dogs have indicated almost total replacement of these original dogs by European dogs, but the extent to which Arctic, North and South American breeds are descendants of the original population remains to be assessed. Using a comprehensive phylogeographic analysis, we traced the origin of the mitochondrial DNA lineages for Inuit, Eskimo and Greenland dogs, Alaskan Malamute, Chihuahua, xoloitzcuintli and...

Humans and dogs enjoy a prehistoric relationship, a longstanding bond with its origins in a time when dogs as we know them evolved from wild animals into our domesticated companions. Now, a canine living in a manner similar to that of dogs from those ancient days may have been discovered in isolated stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps in the American Southeast. The Carolina Dog, a familiar-looking animal long known in the rural South as the "yaller dog," may be more than the common mutt that immediately meets the eye. I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Senior Ecologist at the University...