One of the earliest publications to document the "Indian" dogs of North America was an article by Glover Morrill Allen in 1920.

[7] Allen cites late nineteenth-century studies of skeletal remains of dogs that could be found from Alaska to Florida to the Greater Antilles and westward to the Great Plains, and were excavated from Indian mounds as well: Cope (1893) was the first to describe the jaw of this dog from a specimen collected by Moore from a shell-mound on the St. Johns River, Florida.

In a large mound on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, he (1897) found several interments of human and dog-skeletons, the latter always buried separately and entire, showing that the dogs had not been used as food.

Other dog-skeletons of a similar sort were found by Moore (1899) in aboriginal mounds on the South Carolina coast ... Putnam considered them the same as the larger Madisonville (Ohio) dogs.

[7]These dogs were publicized by I. Lehr Brisbin Jr., a senior research ecologist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who first came across a Carolina dog while working at the Savannah River Site, which was depopulated and secured of all trespass and traffic for decades beginning in 1950.

Carolina dogs are medium-sized; their height ranges from 18 to 24 inches (46 to 61 cm), and weight from 35 to 50 pounds (16 to 23 kg).

[13] The ears are characteristic and are erect, very long, and moderately slender, tapering up to elegantly pointed tips, and they can be individually turned to the direction of any sound, providing extremely sensitive hearing.

Colors vary, and may include reddish ginger, buff, fawn, black-and-tan, or piebald[15] with or without white areas on toes, chest, tail tip, and muzzle.

The area along the edges of the eyes is often (but not always) a distinctive black "eyeliner" coloration which becomes more pronounced by contrast in lighter-colored dogs.

[20] In contrast, the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog both belong to haplotype A29[21][22][c] which is in the a2 sub-haplogroup,[23][24] hence there is no genetic relationship in the mtDNA.