Little Men: A Mystery of No Small Significance

It was hard to believe: Forty blocks north of Columbia University, 100 blocks north of Tiffany’s, on the edge of Harlem, lay a deceased European man who had been shrunk to a height of 31 inches. This piece of information was conveyed to me over a casual lunch one bright summer day two years ago by a longtime resident of this amazing city in which all unthinkable things are possible. As a child my acquaintance had seen the object in the National Museum of the American Indian, and her memory of it was vivid. It had stood within a glass cabinet, a fully formed man with blond hair and mustache, shrunk to puppet size by Jivaro headhunters of the South American forest.