When Ancestral Dog Portraits have themselves ancestors, here is what they could look like:

Thierry Poncelet has still had a great admiration for the french illustrator Grandville, one of the best known for this type of creation.

But if we take some time to look forward till the beginning of humanity, the idea of creature mixing human and animal has still been a very popular idea.

The Egyptian gods were represented as human-animal creatures. Anubis, god of death and funerals has for example a striking likeness whith Poncelet's creations...

Through Antiquity and Middle Ages, half dog half human creatures were thought to live in far eastern regions of the world and often represented on romanesque and gothic churches as well as in book illuminations.

Later at the classical age, the idea of likeness between animal and human creatures was considered as a part of science.
After Leonardo da Vinci, the famous french painter Lebrun inspired himself of animal depictions to describe different types of human portraits, along physical features.