The Arctic Home in the Vedas is written by an very important figure in the Indian History of Independence Bal Gangadhar Tilak. According to wikipedia:
It propounded the idea that the North Pole was the original home of Aryans during the pre-glacial period which they had to leave due to the ice deluge around 8000 B.C. and had to migrate to the Northern parts of Europe and Asia in search of lands for new settlements. In support to his theory, Tilak presented certain Vedic hymns, Avestic passages, Vedic chronology and Vedic calendars with interpretations of the contents in detail.
A summary of the book is also given in that article which looks plausible but this theory is certainly not the accepted one at present. But I do not see any factual rebuttals to this on the wikipedia article, searching on Google also yields nothing. What are the rebuttals for this theory, if possible please cite some sources so that I can read some more on this.
8,000BC predates our linguistic evidence for the movement of Aryan peoples, and also predates our archaeological evidence. In particular, there is a lack of archaeological evidence for human activity in the Arctic at that time, because (a) the northern parts of European landmasses were scoured clean by glaciers in the last glacial period, and (b) there is a lack of land at the north pole.
The main rebuttals to this theory are scientific, rather than historical (because 8,000BC is thoroughly pre-historic) or archaeological (because of points (a) and (b) above). What has been added to science since this north pole theory is an understanding of how the large-scale topography of the Earth changes (continental drift, mountain formation, etc.), and measurements of historical temperatures. From the former, we know that, going back many millions of years, before there were any human ancestors we might grace with the description of "close to human", there were no significant land masses at the north pole. From the latter, temperature measurements, we know that the north pole, even discounting the absence of land, was rather inhospitable going back to about 100,000 years ago.
A summary of the evidence:
Depth of the Arctic Ocean, essentially unchanged since well before the evolution of humans: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBCAO_betamap.jpg
Global temperature over the last 1/2 million years, basically all ice age other than relatively brief warm interglacial periods, the last being about 100,000 years ago: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
Basically, there was no land at the north pole for Aryans to leave 10,000 years ago, and even if there was, they would have had to leave about 100,000 years ago. Given the genetic evidence for the departure of most of the modern human gene pool, including Aryans, from Africa well after 100,000 years ago, this rules out the north pole as an Aryan homeland.
