Information retrieval is difficult. Many important works in various subjects in human history have been developed much earlier than they were widely known. They remained unknown due to geography, language, culture, and popularity barriers. Even today when everything is online, sometimes important works are still ignored until rediscovered.
What if an alien civilization came to Earth in ~4000 B.C.E and gave human civilizations worldwide a information system, which can: (1) search keywords and obtain full text of any written work related to a topic, (2) obtain the state-of-art researches on a subject by querying it with natural language, (3) create an online forum for scholars to communicate their works, (4) translate the text to any language.
That is, the alien does not directly create or teach any knowledge for/to humans, but help humans to retrieve and communicate existing knowledge to the maximum extent.
What could the alternative human history be? Would we discover Newtonian mechanics 1000 years earlier? You know, if the Greek tradition was followed, or if Arabic scholars were able to communicate their researches directly with Europeans and Asians, discovering Newtonian mechanics 1000 years earlier sounds extremely plausible.
Last time I asked this question, someone suggested that the inevitable consequence is the creation of a global patent system, in which pure objective knowledge can also be patented.