Abstract: The Yangtze River is the longest river in China and one of the most main rivers in the world. The Yangtze River delta area is one of the most densely populated and economically developed areas in China. Therefore, studying characteristics and changes of Late Cenozoic geology and environment of the area is of very important significance for national welfare and the people's livelihood there. This kind of studies has had a whole century of history. With the development of economy and the progress of science and technology, some major progress has been made in this studies. In this paper we reviewed progress made on basis of data of such aspects as the modern development of the Yangtze River delta, incision and filling of the Yangtze River valleys during the latest pleniglacial age, changes of sedimentary facies during the post-glacial period, the distribution, characteristics and origin of buried hard earth layers, Late Quaternary transgressive sequences and Neogene and Early-Middle Quaternary stratigraphic units and sedimentary environments in the Yangtze River delta area, sedimentary compositions and geochemical analyses of delta sediments, and age spectrums of detrital zircon and monazite from borehole samples. Among the progress is the time of the Yangtze River breaking through the Three Gorges as an obstacle. At the same time some open questions were also pointed out in this paper. Then according to the reviews, we put forward several suggestions for the coming research to call researchers' attention to produce the effect of throwing away a brick in order to get a gem.