The actual title of the news item is: Exploding star 'helped humans evolve'

...although the angle of the scientists is that cosmic rays heated the Earth (as they would have done), which in turn helped humans evolve. My take is that the cosmic rays had a more direct role, that of mutating humans.

Stardust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led to a theory that a supernova explosion three million years ago may have helped cause human evolution. Debris from an exploding supernova, which could have changed the climate on Earth when man's ancestors first began to walk, has been discovered by a Munich scientific team. Gunther Korschinek and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich reported in Physical Review Letters that depending on how far away the supernova was, it might have caused an increase in cosmic rays for about 300,000 years that, in turn, could have heated up the Earth. The timing of the star explosion coincides with a change in the climate in Africa, when drier conditions caused forests to retreat and the savannah to emerge. Anthropologists believe this change brought early hominids out of the trees. "The African climate shifted towards more arid conditions about 2.8 million years ago," Dr Korschinek and team wrote. "Some of the major events in early hominid evolution appear to be coeval (of the period) with the African climate changes."

Source: Melbourne Herald Sun