Not always. Some of the greatest historical finds have been stumbled across by random dudes just wandering around the neighborhood. Like ...

Nobody thinks that all of the world's ancient treasures are discovered by whip-toting adventurers swinging around caves. But we do assume that they're at least found by some kind of trained professionals.

6 The Dead Sea Scrolls

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In 1947, a Bedouin goat herder and his cousin decided to take a day off from shepherding to wander around some creepy old caves near the coast of the Dead Sea. Instead of the absolutely nothing you would usually expect to find in a cave underneath the desert, the shepherds accidentally found themselves in a Lara Croft level. The caves were full of weird old pottery artifacts, and if anyone knows anything about caves with old artifacts in them, it's that there's going to be treasure, and probably booby traps that can only be disarmed by riddles or very precise jumps.

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How do you even get here without a whip?

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Disappointingly, the pottery only contained a bunch of old scrolls. After momentarily checking to see if they were maps to treasure, the shepherds took them anyway and carefully preserved the scrolls via the tried and true method of tying them to a tent pole ... until they found a dealer who was interested in buying them for around 30 bucks. And that was basically that. Everybody learned a valuable lesson about expecting to find anything valuable in a bunch of desert caves.

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"We should have just used it for toilet paper. Do you have any idea how expensive that is in the desert?"

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The hunks of old parchment went back and forth between several unimpressed village folk, some of whom probably used them as napkins or dishrags, before they were sold to someone who actually figured out what he was looking at: the oldest goddamned existing copy of the Bible. And we're talking the oldest by a thousand years. We now call them the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they are commonly regarded as the most important historical discovery of the 20th century.