Nor does it prove cultural learning, as various physical phenomema also follow Zipf's law: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Ne...
I feel like you buried the lede in your post. People studying these physical systems are generally excited about the shared features, in my understanding
An alternate headline that makes the point clear: "Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human city populations". Equally true, but with much less dramatic implications.
Teeing up an Atlantis joke you know will get downvoted to hell on HN is just cruel man.
(ed - in other words, cultural transmission of humpback whale song isn't part of the claims of the paper. The result is the Zipf distribution, and they hypothesize that the Zipf-law is emerging because of the cultural component.)