I wouldn't mind a quote, because the paper was incredibly hard to read, full of hedging, and never seemed to get to the point.
OK, there's this section:
> The Question of Decoration.
> Recent studies have measured the regularity of notches on bones to determine whether they are more or less visually striking as a decoration. Increasing the regularity of distances between notches—up to the differences just about perceivable by humans—is argued to enhance the decorative value. Such technological and experimental analyses are useful to thoroughly understand the production processes behind a given mobile artifact.
On the other hand, categories such as “decoration” and “numerical system,” or “decoration” and “writing system” are not mutually exclusive. Rather, sign systems can be used as decoration without losing their information value. This is exemplified in historic times by calligraphy, inscriptions on pottery and temples, tattoos of graphemes on human bodies, and many other artistic expressions. “Information density” in an information-theoretic sense is a fundamental property of a sign sequence, irrespective of whether there is a human present to interpret it—or merely find it aesthetically pleasing.
So what are they saying: yes it looks like decoration, but maybe that's because it's calligraphy, and it's less than completely random. That means it's proto-writing because there's a scientific theory we can use to cloud the question of what it is exactly that we're claiming.
The BBC article on this quotes a researcher saying "The Stone Age sign sequences are an early alternative to writing." Fucking hell, "alternative to writing". We're not going out on a limb and saying its writing, but we want to heavily imply that without risking being wrong.
I think the paper was just an exploration of various possibilities and doesn't come to any firm conclusion, because there isn't enough information to conclude anything.
I would assume that people in the past generally did things because they found it useful, though, and the idea that they were merely idly creating art is a more remarkable claim than that they were doing something primarily utilitarian, at least from their point of view.
To me, all of it seems like tally marks and counting and tally marks are among the earliest forms of writing we have in pretty much every case that I am aware of.
