Interesting. I seem to be missing something also. The photos on the various links seem to be just patterns. The illustration from Jo-anne seems to be writing with a superficial resemblance to runes - but they are not runes. Being a suspicious kind of bloke, I would like to see the original.

However - Rudgley in "Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age" does give a photograph of 10,000 year old engraved bones from the Remouchamps cave in Belgium. These show a similar series of engraved lines and we should not discount the possibilty of very early counting systems or tallying. Even if we do not want to accept it as a calender or evidence of writing.

He shows another bone engraved with a series of 5 dots just like the pattern of 5 on a modern dice. Intriguing