Multiple revisions of a file (it's history) can be propagated to the parent view during a VCM promote session. This is typically likely if you have checked in multiple versions of a branched file in the child view, and then you ran the promote and want to carry the history of all subsequent revisions since the last promote.
Since the historical revisions in the child view may have been created by other users (than the user doing the commit), the person performing the commit must be granted impersonation rights at the server.
This feature can only be turned on at the project level using the new project option: Merge File History during VCM commits, and is supported on StarTeam Server versions 16.0+.