I think you're possibly being overly narrow with your notion of "memory". Such a thing would not be a memory in the sense of something stored in the nervous system, but it would still be a memory in the sense of stored information based on past occurrences that influence future behavior. (And all memories are physical changes, after all!)

And while that's certainly nowhere near as noteworthy as if memories from the nervous system were somehow being directly passed down, it does not seem to be a correct statement that this "is not an unexpected outcome of the study within the current model". I mean, sure, the model doesn't exclude this outcome, but it certainly seems that nobody expected it to happen in a case like this.