Did Early Humans See Black Holes at Night?

no way?

Astronomers think some of the earliest people on Earth saw them. Is that too hard to believe or is it a possibility? This does seem to come off as far fetched but there is some method to this madness. At least according to some. Here is the intro and a bit of description on how astronomers thought this could be the case.

Some 2 million years ago, around the time our ancestors were learning to walk upright, a light appeared in the night sky, rivalling the moon for brightness and size. But it was more fuzzball than orb. The glow came from the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart suddenly exploding into life.

This novel picture emerges from work announced this week at a conference in Sydney, Australia, which ingeniously pieces together two seemingly unrelated, outstanding galactic puzzles.

As well as offering a welcome way to solve both, it gives us an unexpected glimpse of how the cosmos might have appeared to Earthlings 2 million years ago (see “Which species saw the flare?“). “That is when we had Homo erectusrunning around Earth,” says Joss Bland-Hawthorn of the University of Sydney, who led the team behind the work.

Ok they make a very bold statement there. Just keep with the thread and check out a bit more on why they think this might have been.

Let’s check out a sweet videos with some graphics portraying these black holes on page 2