Linus played with Monotone before he started git (and it shows)

He is even credited in the changelog: http://lwn.net/Articles/131744/

BitKeeper not being available anymore was the impetus for starting Git and Mercurial (as replacements for BK), but many of the concepts in Git and Hg come from Monotone, most importantly the use of merkle trees (according to /u/ggherdov Matt Mackall[0] recently mentioned this explicitly on IRC). Linus also mentioned Monotone by name as "the most viable alternative" before starting/publishing git[1] and as pgeorgi noted contributed to the same.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/31yi7d/graydon...

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121