This work is about what I have come to think of as the journey of the dog. That is, a major goal is to clarify just when and how the dog came into being, and what steps it took along the way to arrive at its modern destination. In a curious way, though, this is also a story about my own journey through the world of dog-related research for more than two decades. To a certain extent, the progression of topics covered here roughly parallels the course of developments in my dog-related research work.

In an ultimate sense, work on this book began more than twenty years ago, though I was not aware of it then. At that time I published my first paper on dogs (Morey 1986), as a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a study concerning matters of taxonomic resolution from archaeological bones in the North American plains. Those as well as other taxonomic issues receive attention in Chapter 3. Subsequently, I was awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Tennessee, with a dissertation devoted to the evolution of the domestic dog as revealed especially from archaeological cranial remains (Morey 1990). That was my first synthetic effort devoted to the dog, and though it has its weaknesses, some of which bear noting, I also draw from it at several junctures during the course of this book.