The Elephant Matriarch's Experience
Accumulated experience can matter to an elephant family group. Playback experiments found that older matriarchs were better at distinguishing social calls from familiar and unfamiliar families. Other experiments found that a matriarch’s age was associated with more appropriate responses to different lion threats. These are examples of social memory and experience, not proof of human-like conscious “map sharing” with younger elephants.
Elephants also use spatial information: movement observations show directed travel toward dispersed water sources, especially in the dry season. A study during a severe drought in Tanzania found higher calf mortality among younger mothers and differences between family groups that stayed in the park and those that left to seek resources. These studies do not separately prove that a particular matriarch remembered a specific distant water source or route.
The source list appears to contain a typo (“тривалих послуг,” literally “long services”); I interpret it in context as “prolonged droughts,” and have phrased the publication accordingly.