Use the variant functionality to retrospectively create variants for historical versions of an object. Use this method if you have already updated a topic's content but now want to go back and recover each change to the content making the different versions of the object available for publishing.
The selected topic is converted to a primary object and always shows the "earliest" version of the content you are going to work with for your content. Like normal variant usage, the variant objects show the "newer" variations of the content.