Everyone is forgetting “monotone”, a DVCS developed by Graydon Hoare (who later went to create Rust) of which the Git model is essentially a simplification (and much much less related to BitKeeper)

There was a lot of experimentation with VCSes at the time: arch -> tla -> baz ; bzr ; monotone ; cdv ; mercurial ; git ; even sun was finally getting merge tracking.

Monotone had the best structure but a slow and clunky implementation. It was adopted and simplified (in different ways) by git and hg; eventually git won by virtue of being way faster and demonstrably effective for a project the size of the Linux kernel (and Linus’ celebrity status didn’t hurt either)

But graydon hoare deserves a lot more credit than he received - Linus did credit him at the time, but no one seems to remember.