中文摘要：

面孔,即脊椎动物头部的正面,对动物机体的运作和人类社会生活有重要意义,面孔的演化长久以来吸引着学界和大众的兴趣,是备受关注的经典科学问题.最近数十年来,演化基因组学、演化发育生物学和古生物学等领域的一系列进展,使得学界对脊椎动物面孔基本构架和面部各器官的演化有了许多新的认识.本文对脊椎动物从鱼到人的面孔演化进行了梳理,重点介绍了近年来在头部和颌骨的起源与演化、耳鼻眼演化、牙齿演化以及人类面部特征形成等领域的一批新知.回顾面孔演化历程,人类面孔许多社会属性的生理基础都可以清楚地追溯到我们与其他脊椎动物的共同祖先中.

英文摘要：

Face, the frontal portion of the head of vertebrates, plays a crucial role in the physical and social life in human and other animals. The face of human is thought to represent one＇s identity and personality. Indeed, the word ＂person＂ or ＂people＂ in modern English is the etymological descendant of the ancient Greek word ＂πrpπov＂ or prosopon. It was only later realized that similar facial features shared by human and other vertebrates have common origins. Since then, the evolution of face has long been the spotlight issue in evolutionary biology. A series of important advances in evolutionary genomics, evolutionary developmental biology and paleontology has renewed our understanding of the vertebrate face evolution from fish to human. In this paper we briefly reviewed some of these advances following the steps of the vertebrate facial evolution from the architecture of craniates, ＂a new head＂, to the emergence of the expressive mask in human. The ＂new head＂, with supporting skull and novel sensory organs, vastly improved the sensory and overall evolutionary potentials of vertebrates. The developmental foundation of this innovation is the migration of neural crest cells and the formation of placodes. The origin of jaw is another key innovation in the rise of modern jawed vertebrate face. The traditional hypothesis that takes the jaw as the derivate of the anterior gill arch is under challenge. The intersection of developmental biology and paleontological evidences contributes to a well-supported new model, in which the disassociation of the naso-hypophyseal complex is a prerequisite for the origin of the jaw. The similarity between jaws and gill arches might be secondary. The recent discovery of Silurian maxillate placoderms illuminates the origin of marginal dermal jaw bones that leads to the primary functional jaw bones in most modern vertebrates including ourselves. We now have a clear picture of how facial organs such as noses, eyes, ears and teeth adapt to great transitions in vertebrat