I believe it is possible, specially that the article says that there were locals that used the same technique. It could very easily learn how to mimic human behaviour.
Looks like a spear to me.
I'm disappointed by your answer, but even more so that you have more than 1 upvote. For once, reddit provided more value to me than Hacker News:
The comment you cite has enough made up data and weak reasoning to make the daily mail look respectable. For actual data, let us turn to the internet. The February 2007 report involving chimpanzees does lend credibility to this orangutan picture: