> Recently, Timsort has become popular, also a variation of Merge Sort. However, Timsort was not invented yet in 2008.

Timsort is from 2002. Not sure where this comes from. Perhaps it wasn't as popular or widely known in 2008 as it is now, but I actually learned about it at about that time. See also:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/02683...

(edit: timsort was introduced to Java in 2009, per https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-6804124, and knowledge of it would probably have spread much further from that point, so maybe that's the source of confusion?)