These deep structures, styles, social modes, range of intelligence, aggression, creativity, pitted against environmental factors, must have erupted in a mind capable of adaptive abstract thought, which we seemingly have control over, yet still directed by an instinctive hard wiring.

We survived, and our hominid competitors didn't. The competition between differing species of hominidae, close enough to require the same resources, but distant enough in structure to preclude cooperation, could have forced the hand of cerebral development until the winner, sapiens, emerged to take all.

Recalling Bateson's idea, the developmental land rush which populated the Earth with humans, and not something else, may have placed a new set of cortical structures on top of old ones with such speed that the older, Neanderthal grade thinking apparatus did not have time to become gradually subsumed under the control of higher structures, but had a capacity for high abstraction grafted onto it under the stresses of selection pressure.