It all started with village dogs. Did you know that most of the dogs in the world are not descended from modern breeds? The majority of dogs in the world are a unique kind of dog, called village dogs.

Village dogs are free-ranging, free-breeding dogs whose ancestors were indigenous to a geographic area. To learn more about these special dogs, our founders spent years traveling the world and swabbing dogs in remote areas of Europe, Asia, and South America, along with a Cornell University-led research team. Through this work they discovered the origins of the dog in Central Asia, and also identified genetic regions involved in domestication and local adaptation. At Embark, we're proud to be the only dog DNA test that can identify village dogs, with the largest village dog reference panel of any canine genetics company.

Village dogs are important because they help us understand topics like where dogs came from, the history of domestic dogs, and how dogs and humans learned to live together. They were crucial to the rise of the modern breeds–and to the founding of Embark!

So, while a village dog does not have ancestry from modern breeds, their ancestors may have contributed to the founding of today’s dog breeds. Although they’re not recognized by kennel clubs as a breed, they are genetically identifiable, with many different village dog populations around the world. When we identify a dog as a village dog, it’s not because we can’t figure out what breeds are in the dog. Each type of village dog has a unique genetic signature that we can use to identify village dog ancestry.

What is a Supermutt? At Embark, we take pride in transparency. If a percentage of your dog’s breed mix doesn’t match any breeds in our database, or if it’s too small a percentage for us to be sure that it’s accurate, we’ll tell you. Other dog DNA tests may show other breeds in your dog’s results to make up that small percentage – breeds that may or may not actually be present.

“Supermutt” refers to a portion of ancestry that is from significantly far back in a dog’s family tree and therefore cannot be as confidently identified as more recently inherited breeds. Our ancestry algorithm works by finding identical segments of DNA between your dog and the purebred dogs in our reference dataset. These long identical stretches of DNA are more likely to reflect recent ancestry, whereas shorter segments reflect more distant ancestry.

Many dogs descend from other dogs that were themselves mixed breed. The further in the past, your dog has purebred ancestors, the smaller the identical DNA segments match our reference dataset are. In some cases, the best matches to our reference dataset are so small (reflecting very distant ancestry) that they can no longer be as confidently assigned to any one particular breed. Instead these are assigned to the “Supermutt” percentage. Within the “Supermutt” result, we provide insight into which breeds are most likely to be distant ancestors.

Why breed results can be surprising. Sometimes looks can be deceiving! And your dog’s breeds may not obviously match their appearance. While it’s fun to guess which breeds might make up your dog, visual breed identification is notoriously unreliable—studies have shown that visual breed ID is wrong over 80% of the time!. Less than 1% of a dog’s 20,000 genes impact appearance. There is so much variation among dogs in general that visual or behavioral ID is generally an unreliable way to diagnose a dog’s ancestry.

Even in single-breed dogs, it is ultimately several genetic trait results (and not necessarily their breed) that are responsible for appearance. While breeders tend to strive for consistency in several of these traits to match a breed standard, this in no way precludes the possibility of a surprising outcome in a single-breed puppy. Additionally, dogs with a single-breed result can sometimes have a very small percentage of DNA (about 1-5%) that represents a separate breed. These very small proportions are typically undetectable by a DNA test, but can yield some surprising looks in an otherwise single-breed dog.