Stone Tools in Sulawesi Point to Neighbor of Flores ‘Hobbit’

"... perhaps descended from Homo erectus individuals washed eastward atop tsunami debris"

Is this really the general consensus about how pre homo sapiens human species traversed bodies of water?

It sounds a little ridiculous, but it seems just about as plausible as most things in paleo-archeology[1]. I've been on a kick of reading a lot of nautical fiction and autobiography, and you come across a lot of accounts of plant and animal life transported surprising distances in the aftermath of severe storms.

[1] Could archaeologists, or really, the media reporting on it, be more upfront about the fact that virtually everything they are talking about is wild speculation based on very tenuous evidence? I don't want to knock the people doing the work of digging this stuff up and trying to understand it; but really, when you find one jawbone and extrapolate an entire organism, complete with artists renderings and even taxidermied monstrosities, or compare incomplete, fragmentary, dried out, degraded DNA material from Hominid A and B to conclude which is more closely related to modern man, my bullshit detectors start going off. The sample size is just too small.