"Does this mean that society would never discover certain facts had the most brilliant people not existed?"

Absolutely! If they or their equivalent had never existed in circumstances of the same suggestiveness. My favorite example of this uniqueness is the awesome imagination required first to "see" how stars appear when located behind a black hole -- the way they seem to congregate around the event horizon. Put another way: the imaginative power able to propose star deflections that needed a solar eclipse to prove.