"Neanderthal Man" is a song by Hotlegs, an English pop band that was later relaunched as 10cc. The song, initially created only as a studio exercise to test drum sounds on new recording equipment, sold over two million copies and reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 22 in the US. It reached No.1 in Italy and Germany and was also a Top 20 hit in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland and Japan.

The song was the first to be recorded at Strawberry Studios in , England, on new four-track Ampex equipment purchased by studio owners Eric Stewart, Graham Gouldman and Peter Tattersall. It featured a simple repeated chorus and a heavy drum rhythm that Gouldman's manager, Harvey Lisberg, has claimed became influential in pop music. He said: "I think a lot of people were very influenced by 'Neanderthal Man', which was something new in drum sounds, using four drums on a four-track machine. When Gary Glitter came along with his records, I thought I could hear the same sort of sound deep down in there. I think there were a lot of other people who copied the sound, maybe unintentionally."

Stewart recalled that when the recording equipment had been set up, Kevin Godley set up his drum kit, Lol Creme got out his guitar and Stewart sat down at the control desk. "It was the first time we'd had a real control desk with a four-track machine and we were excited to try it all out," he said. "The whole thing was just an experiment because Kevin wanted to lay all sorts of different drum beats down that he hadn't recorded before, and there was this crazy sort of nursery rhyme that had just got into our heads."

"As we laid down the drum tracks, Lol was singing in the studio with Kevin keeping time – and after we'd laid four drum tracks down Lol's voice came through at a very high level, sounding like something none of us had ever heard before on a record. It really sounded very strange, so we carried on working on the number, adding little bits of piano to it."

By good fortune, Dick Leahy of Philips Records, (the Record company that had released all the singles by Stewart's former band The Mindbenders on its Fontana label), was in the Manchester area on business and visited the studio. When he asked Stewart what they had been working on, Stewart played the "Neanderthal Man" tape they had just completed. Stewart said Leahy immediately claimed, "It's fabulous! It's a hit record!" and offered a ₤500 advance. The advance was particularly timely for Stewart, who was considering selling his house and moving to something smaller to provide him with more funding for the studio.

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