“…It is commonly assumed that the Cenozoic rifts have avoided the cratons and follow the mobile belts (McConnell, 1972;Mohr, 1982), which serve as the weakest pathways for rift propagation. Structural control exerted by the pre-existing heterogeneities within the Proterozoic belts at the scale of individual faults or rifts has also been demonstrated (Corti, van Wijk, Cloetingh, & Morley, 2007;Katumwehe, Abdelsalam, & Atekwana, 2015;Morley, 2010;Ring, 1994;Smets et al, 2016;Theunissen, Klerkx, Melnikov, & Mruma, 1996;Versfelt & Rosendahl, 1989). However, as shown by Koptev, Calais, Burov, Leroy, and Gerya (2015), Koptev et al (2016), the formation of two rift zones on opposite sides of a thick lithosphere segment can be explained without appealing to pre-imposed heterogeneities at the crustal level.…”