The story of Little Foot's discovery is astonishing. A paleontologist was looking through some bone fragments from Sterkfontein and recognized some fragments as hominid. He sent his assistants to the cave with a broken end of a tibia, and they found the matching piece protruding from the cave wall, which was how the skeleton was found.
The sheer audacity of even attempting to find the matching piece in that cave boggles the mind.