unknown option `allow-unrelated-histories'

I documented before how that option has been introduced in Git 2.9, June 2016 (as mentioned by merlin2011 in the comments)

Since Ubuntu LTS 14.04 comes with an old 1.9+ Git, you need to reference an up-to-date ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install git

That ppa (Personnal Archive Package) is the git-core/+archive/ubuntu/ppa, and will include the latest Git 2.11 release.