As I understand it, Mercurial development was started as a reaction to this mail where Torvalds states that the kernel team is looking for Bitkeeper alternative

As I understand it, Mercurial development was started as a reaction to this mail where Torvalds states that the kernel team is looking for Bitkeeper alternatives: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121 http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121 Git didn't exist yet at that point.