Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest known use of cotton in the Old World occurred in the 6th millennium BC. A single strand of cotton fiber was preserved inside a copper bead at the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in present-day Pakistan.
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was a myth that cotton grew on trees bearing tiny lambs. This misconception persisted until the 17th century and was perpetuated by the 14th-century writer John Mandeville.
The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 cemented the institution of slavery in the South. Before the gin, processing a single bale of cotton required over 600 hours of human labor, but the machine reduced the time to just a dozen hours per bale.
Genetically modified cotton accounted for 69% of the global cotton area in 2011. Bt cotton contains a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and has reduced the need for broad-spectrum insecticides.
The earliest cotton discovery at Mehrgarh took place in present-day Pakistan. The site is located in the Kachi Plain of South Asia and dates to the 6th millennium BC.