Wil Roebroeks was born on 5 May 1955 in Sint Geertruid. He began his academic career as a history student at the Radboud University Nijmegen where he graduated cum laude in 1979. He then studied prehistory at Leiden University, graduating in 1982. In 1989 he obtained his PhD from the same university, again graduating cum laude. In 1991 he won the Eureka! prijs award for his popular science work Oermensen in Nederland. In 1996 he became a professor at Leiden University. In 2005 Roebroeks achieved international fame when challenging the Out of Africa theory in Nature. In another article in the same journal Roebroeks published on the discovery of stone tools in Great Britain, older than expected and contradicting the previously held belief that Northern Europe was settled much later than the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. In 2007 the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek awarded Roebroeks the Spinozapremie. The jury report highlighted his various original contributions to the study of human prehistory and called him the most prominent Dutch archaeologist nationally and internationally. In 2009 Roebroeks again made the international news with his work on Krijn, the first Dutch Neanderthal fossil. This discovery prompted him to argue for the founding of a North-Sea Institute to deal with the archaeological material found in that sea. In 2012 he published an article about the earliest ochre use of early Neandertals. The discovery was made at the Maastricht-Belvédère archaeological site which has an estimated age of 250.000 BP. See: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1112261109.abstract
Publications
Roebroeks has published in a number of academic journals including Current Anthropology, Nature and the Journal of Human Evolution. What follows is a selection of his most prominent publications:
Oermensen in Nederland: De Archeologie van de Oude Steentijd, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff
"Dense forests, cold steppes and the Palaeolithic settlement of Northern Europe". with Thijs van Kolfschoten and Nicholas Conard, in Current Anthropology33, No. 5: 551-586.
"Updating the Earliest Occupation of Europe",, in Current Anthropology35, No. 3: 301-305
The Earliest Occupation of Europe, with Thijs van Kolfschoten, Leiden: Leiden University Press
"Use of ochre by early Neandertals", with Mark Sier, Trine Kellberg Nielsen, Dimitri De Loecker, Josep Maria Parés, Charles Arps and Herman Mücher, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA109: 1889-1894
