Feb 24, 2015
A dim red dwarf and its brown-dwarf companion likely grazed the outer edges of the solar system 70,000 years ago in what scientists say was the closest encounter ever between our sun and another star. [...] At its closest point, Scholz's star would have been a 10th-magnitude star — 50 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye. However, brief flares on the star could have lit it up thousands of times brighter, making it potentially visible to early mankind for a few minutes or hours at a time, the researchers explained.
space.com
Entirely coincidentally, this event seems to have occurred at approximately the same point in human history as the emergence of behavioral modernity. Is that Thus Spake Zarathustra I hear?