incorporating the past

Hi

I have looked through some git tutorials and the manual, and what is interesting me most right now is, how do I handle a situation like this with git? It's purely speculative, I don't have such a situation in reality, so my description might be a bit murky...

I'll try to make an extremely simple example, just one file, no branching etc.

I have a file under version control, that I got at the point of file version 1.0. I start committing changes:

o--o--o--o--o--o--o ^ ^ git init, current, version 1.0 version 1.6

Then I get the history up to my version 1.0 from somewhere else (former maintainer, whatever). In the form of plain text files, one for each version; say, versions 0.1 thru 0.9. I want to incorporate this past into my tree.

Can I just do another git init for 0.1, commit the changes up to 1.0 and merge those two histories? Don't I need a common ancestor for both or something like that?

Or can I do the same, only up to 0.9 instead of 1.0, and then "sew together" those histories?

Is there some kind of "add-past", where the changed contents in the working directory are prepended, not appended to the history? So that I could "prepend" 0.9, then 0.8 and so on until 0.1?

I guess, I just don't have a clear grasp of what "history" and "branch" and so on mean.

Thomas