An acquaintance of mine, who teaches music to Navajo and Apache kids & teenagers, told me once that the Navajo believe the nearby Apache are shorter and smaller than them. He hadn’t given the matter a second thought until a Navajo told him this, and the next time he was among Apache, he noticed that the Apache were actually shorter and smaller.
Which could easily be caused by diet rather than genetics. It’s a crapshoot. It’s easier to pick up on cultural differences than it is on physical ones.
Well, diet can cause a noticeable difference and be used to recognize differences. I don’t claim to be an expert on Native Americans, but Tony Hillerman, in all of his SW books, had his characters able to identify different tribal groups from a visual alone.
We’ve had this discussion before about Asians. There is a percentage of the population, I have no idea what, that looks like their group. Eg, 50% of Japanese, look, well, Japanese. And there’s a percentage of Korean’s that look Korean, and Han chinese that look Han. There is also a stereotypical look of certain Han sub-groups. Actress Joan Chen is very stereotypically Shanghaiese looking. I will also agree it is also harder to do so with a 3rd generation Asian Americans. It’s not infallable but I can certainly do better than random and I do get it completely wrong more often than I would like to.