Cotton seeds from the Neolithic in Egyptian Nubia and the origin of Old World cotton

During an excavation at Afyeh, Egyptian Nubia, in 1962, the Archaeological Survey of India recovered some plant remains. These contained, in addition to charred cereals, a few cotton seeds and dung of small animals. An anatomical study of the seed coat and hairs has revealed that this ancient Nubian cotton is similar, in the characters examined, to Gossypium arboreum var. soudanense and G. herbaceum var. africanum. Some hairs recovered from the dung indicate that the animals were fed with this cotton. The significance of this find is that the Nubians did not know at that time the potentiality of cotton hairs for making textile, but they apparently recognized the nutritive value of cotton seeds for animal feed. The hairs show an early stage of evolution from the wild to the cultivated cotton, having convolutions in the middle and no convolution towards the ends.