Samu is the nickname given to a fragmentary human occipital bone (also known as "Vertesszolos man", or "Vertesszolos occipital") found in Vértesszőlős,

Central Transdanubia Central Transdanubia ( hu, Közép-Dunántúl) is a statistical ( NUTS 2) region of Hungary. The capital is Székesfehérvár. It is part of Transdanubia (NUTS 1) region. Central Transdanubia includes counties of Fejér, Komárom-Esztergom, and ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

. The discovery was made on 21 August 1965 during a dig led by , and the fossil was named ''Sámuel'', 21 August being the

name day In Christianity, a name day is a tradition in many countries of Europe and the Americas, among other parts of Christendom. It consists of celebrating a day of the year that is associated with one's baptismal name, which is normatively that of a ...

of biblical judge Samuel in Hungarian tradition. It has since become widely known as ''Samu'', a Hungarian short form of the name. Hungarian anthropologist Andor Thoma (1928–2003) initially described it as ''Homo erectus seu sapiens paleohungaricus''. The fossil at the time was believed to be about 500,000 years old, and some literature of the 1970s classifies it as ''Homo erectus''. Analyses performed in the 1990s have revealed a significantly younger age, at between 250,000 and 300,000 years old (

Mindel glaciation The Mindel glaciation (german: Mindel-Kaltzeit, also ''Mindel-Glazial'', ''Mindel-Komplex'' or, colloquially, ''Mindel-Eiszeit'') is the third youngest glacial stage in the Alps. Its name was coined by Albrecht Penck and Eduard Brückner, who nam ...

), and the fossil is now classified as ''

Homo heidelbergensis ''Homo heidelbergensis'' (also ''H. sapiens heidelbergensis''), sometimes called Heidelbergs, is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of '' H. erectus'' i ...

''.István Fzy, István Szente, ''Fossils of the Carpathian Region'' (2013)
p. 412
The itself had been discovered by Márton Pécsi in 1962. Also found at the site were two child teeth,

Abbevillian Abbevillian (formerly also ''Chellean'') is a term for the oldest lithic industry found in Europe, dated to between roughly 600,000 and 400,000 years ago. The original artifacts were collected from road construction sites on the Somme river near ...

stone tools and a fireplace. The site is now open to the public. A replica of the Samu occipital bone is on exhibit in the local museum (the original is kept in the

Hungarian National Museum The Hungarian National Museum ( hu, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum) was founded in 1802 and is the national museum for the history, art, and archaeology of Hungary, including areas not within Hungary's modern borders, such as Transylvania; it is not to ...

), as well as associated tools and fossilized animal footprints. "Samu" has become a common name for plastic skeletons shown in biology classes in Hungarian student slang.

References

{{reflist Homo heidelbergensis fossils Fossils of Hungary Tourist attractions in Komárom-Esztergom County