Why Rabin fingerprints assumes data is prefixed with a "1" bit? (I know that a Rabin fingerprint is not a cryptographic hash, sorry in advance if my question is considered out of topic)

In the paper Some applications of Rabin's fingerprinting method, it is written that implementations should prefix the data to hash by a '1' value.

Does anybody know why?
I think that it was to make sure that the leading zeroes in the data to hash are taken into account during the hash. Without the '1' prefix value, those leading zeroes would make the fingerprint stay to zero.

Without the '1' prefix, the following 2 list of bytes would have the same fingerprint:

[42, 5, 3]

[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 42, 5, 3]