During his research, Menon encountered similar legends referring to an ancient race of “small people” who allegedly constructed megalithic sites across southern India, such as at Moribetta and Morikallu nearby in Karnataka, Sanna Moriyara Thatte in Telanganaand Moral Parai in Tamil Nadu. He speculates that such folklore could be a far-reaching cultural memory of ancient Indians recalling an extinct human-like species, akin to Homo floresiensis, the so-called “hobbit” species discovered in Indonesia who likely lived alongside Homo sapiens 60,000 to 100,000 years ago.

“We know the megalith builders were humans like us,” Menon said. “But stories of these little people persist across the region.”

For decades people have speculated about this image: American Girl in Italy, by the great US photographer Ruth Orkin. On Florence’s Piazza della Repubblica in 1951, a tall young woman in a black dress walks the gauntlet between clusters of suit-wearing men. A few of them are leering at her. One man grabs his crotch, his lips pursed around some presumably unprintable utterance. Almost all of them are following her with their eyes. The woman’s face is hard to read, though she seems aggrieved by the attention – if not outright fearful for her safety.

In fact, according to the woman herself, Ninalee Allen Craig, there was something altogether more playful going on – though she insisted, to counter another assumption, that the photograph wasn’t staged. Craig, 23 at the time, was travelling around Europe when she encountered Orkin, who was staying at the same dollar-a-night hotel as her in Florence. The two women shared notes on solo travel and Orkin proposed a photo essay on the subject.

The next day they jaunted around the city, Orkin snapping the younger woman as she gazed at statues, chatted across café tables and rode shotgun in an open-top sports car.

At the Piazza della Repubblica, Orkin asked Allen to walk the gauntlet twice. The first time, Allen “clutched at herself and looked terribly frightened”, Orkin recalled in 1979. “I told her to walk by the second time, ‘as if it’s killing you but you’re going to make it’” – and that’s the shot that was used.

Allen’s memory of the scene was much sunnier. “I was having the time of my life,” she told CNN in 2017, the year before she died aged 90. “I was Beatrice walking through the streets of Florence.” In an interview with the Guardian she said the image “has been interpreted in a sinister way but it was quite the opposite. [The men] were having fun and so was I.”

Orkin’s photographs of Allen were published in Cosmopolitan in 1952. The article, featuring tips on “money, men and morals to see you through a gay trip and a safe one”, was entitled Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone. 

New York – New York, a show of photographs by Ruth Orkin, will be at CDIS / PhotoEspaña in Santander from 18 July to 18 October