Have there been multiple aboriginal species of dogs?
That's one of &mdash; quite a few, we have to say &mdash; the mistakes Darwin made in his edition from 1859 (I have to confess that this is the only edition I've read, and I reckon this is the only edition anyone should read). This mistake is even more contrasting if you realize that he failed to apply the very same reasoning he had made just a few pages earlier, when discussing variation in pigeons: he explained that, even if counterintuitive, all different pigeons with all different features descend from the same wild species. Then, when he talks about dogs a few pages later, he incomprehensibly makes the same mistake he had just accused his readers of commiting.

Darwin is not the only one: Lorenz made the same unfounded claim, namely that the domestic dog would have two different origins, one from Canis lupus and another one from Canis latrans. We have to agree that Lorenz was way more bold than Darwin when it comes to making unfounded claims.

The fact is that, today, we're pretty sure (the scientific and statistical meaning of sure is being used here) that all domestic dogs (Canis lupus), from the chihuahua to the german shepherd, descend from a population of wolves (also Canis lupus) from east Asia.

Here is a Nature paper from Peter Savolainen, one of the best researchers on this subject: Wang, G., Zhai, W., Yang, H. et al. Out of southern East Asia: the natural history of domestic dogs across the world. Cell Res 26, 21–33 (2016) doi:10.1038/cr.2015.147