Background
Roebroeks, Wil was born on May 5, 1955 in Sint-Geertruid, Netherlands.
anthropologist archaeologist university professor
Roebroeks, Wil was born on May 5, 1955 in Sint-Geertruid, Netherlands.
Wil Roebroeks 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 Doctor of Philosophy from the same university, again graduating cum laude.
He is widely considered to be the pre-eminent Dutch archaeologist. Prijs award for his popular science work Oermensen in Nederland. In 1996 he became a professor at Leiden University.
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.
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 Boite Postale. See: (open source).
German Archaeological Institute. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.