Yes, and according to Wikipedia their initial releases were only 2 weeks apart. Further, you also had Bazaar whose initial release was a month earlier and was

Yes, and according to Wikipedia their initial releases were only 2 weeks apart. Further, you also had Bazaar whose initial release was a month earlier and was itself based on another tool that was released a year before. For whatever reason, creating distributed alternatives to SVN was a very popular thing to do at the time.