We get questions of this sort a lot, so be sure to check out the relevant section of the FAQs.

/u/Snickeringshadow's reply to the first question in that series is a personal favorite of mine and I highly recommend it. His post is mainly a comparison between Mesoamerican and Andean cultures to Old World ones. In this post and this post, I compared Mesoamerican cultures to those further north.

The short version in both cases is that the differences are a lot less pronounced than most people realize.

If you have any follow-up questions after reading those posts, feel free to ask here.