Cotton's roots traced to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest‎

There's nothing like this in nature, Jonathan Wendel said as he showed a visitor in his Bessey Hall office the long white puffs billowing from a cotton boll—the protective flower capsule of the plant cultivated by humans for thousands of years. In the wild, cotton bolls are far smaller and hold darker, coarser and shorter fibers.