A supernova blew up in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Around AD 300, light from it reached Earth's southern hemisphere. 14 January, John Banovetz told the American Astronomical Society at their meeting. Sadly I don't find video.
Nobody knew about this until Banovitz and his Purdue University team tracked its halo in space. As to why, keyword is "Magellanic". Meaning: Magellan's crew were the first literate people to record and describe the whole darn nebula. The Cloud can be seen up to 15° N but you have to be on a flat empty plain for that.
All that said, several equatorial cultures AD 300 were literacy-adjacent: Nicaragua, Somalia, the Tamil-stan, south Vietnam, Philippines. South of that, Polynesians maintained a rich oral tradition. For one thing, they didn't have much else to do down there but retell stories - but more to the point, astronomy was how they did navigation. The Magellanic Clouds featured in their tradition, possibly because (as a whole galaxy) it was such a nova cluster.
The Polynesians were still stuck on Samoa and Tonga; Moana wouldn't get out to Tahiti until AD 700. Maori tell of the Mahutonga - but that legend pinpoints "the Cross". It might be the Crux or the "False Cross" (Vela) but either way, nowhere near the Nubecula Minor. It's been considered the AD 185 nova, if so, spotted long before the Maori came to Aotearoa; lately Vela Jr has been proposed, AD 1271. We're agreed not to take Brakenridge seriously.
Any historical account of this Magellanic nova, or of any other southern nova before Magellan himself, may have to await the recovery of the great Somalian library. Maybe something (somehow) copied from the Tamil and/or Javan kingdoms.
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