Why does my dog look like a Rhodesian Ridgeback, but my results show no Ridgeback ancestry?

We often hear from people who suspected Ridgeback ancestry in their dog, but do not see Ridgeback represented in their dog’s results. Dogs with a fawn sable coat color and black masking (both inherited in a dominant fashion) and a larger body size often end up looking a lot like Ridgebacks, despite having no ancestry from this breed. Even one of our own team members believed that her dog, Sunny, was a Ridgeback mix before testing. You can see his results here: Sunny’s Embark Dog DNA Results. 

It might also be helpful to note that a canonical ridge (observed in Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Thai Ridgebacks, and Phu Quoc Ridgebacks) is caused by a dominant mutation, meaning that a dog only needs one copy of the variant to potentially express this ridge. In fact, it's possible that a dog may have very distant ancestry from a ridgeback breed, but at a level that is below the detection threshold of our algorithms. Despite their ridgeback ancestor being too far back in their lineage for a genetic ancestry test to confidently detect, they may have inherited the mutation that causes a ridgeback phenotype to occur.