In many of Macintosh's scholarly works he made comparisons between the physical anthropology of Australian Aborigines and East Asians in order to identify Aboriginal origins. One of his last papers (with Larnach, 1976) ended with the remarkable and unexplained speculation that it was out of South China, some 70,000 years ago, that modern humans explosively radiated overland to Europe, the Americas, SE Asia, and by watercraft to Australmelanesia. The present paper is sympathetic to that speculation and offers some dental morphological data in its support, and a preliminary suggestion for defining dentally modern humans. At the same time, these data can be interpreted differently, but nevertheless show the great mportance of native Australians and Melanesians for eventually understanding where and how anatomically modern humans originated and evolved.